San Francisco-based Ambience Healthcare has closed a $70 million Series B funding round to scale its AI operating system designed for healthcare organizations. The raise, led by marquee Silicon Valley investors Kleiner Perkins and the OpenAI Startup Fund, signals growing conviction in AI’s ability to enhance clinical workflows and unlock new efficiencies.
Ambience offers a suite of AI tools covering the entire patient journey, from intake and diagnostics to coding and billing. Flagship products include real-time documentation software AutoScribe, intelligent referral coordinator AutoRefer, and coding assistant AutoCDI. Together they aim to automate time-consuming administrative tasks, freeing up clinicians to focus on delivering high-quality care.
Early results validate the approach. Ambience says health systems using its platform have cut documentation time by 78% on average while improving coding accuracy and realizing over 500% ROI. The numbers have attracted customers like UCSF, Memorial Hermann, and John Muir Health seeking relief from clinician burnout and process pain points.
“It feels like I have the world’s best medical scribe...at my side for every single visit,” said Dr. Richard Long, a urologist at John Muir Health.
A key ingredient in Ambience’s early success is custom-tailoring its AI to support the unique needs of specialties from oncology and pediatrics, to emergenccy medicine. This ensures clinical nuance is accounted for instead of a one-size-fits-all model that may fail to resonate.
The company also tightly integrates solutions with leading medical record systems like Epic and Cerner for frictionless adoption. Smooth EMR interoperability and specialization help explain the rave reviews from early clinician users.
Flush with new capital, Ambience aims to expand its operating system into a comprehensive “brain” spanning clinical and back-office workflows. Use cases in development include automated prior authorizations and personalized patient education content.
The latest funding round, also joined by Andreessen Horowitz and Optum Ventures, brings Ambience’s total raised to $100 million since its 2020 founding. The company did not disclose its valuation.
“Healthcare is one of AI’s most promising opportunities to create an outsized positive impact on the world. Ambience Healthcare has built an incredible team to focus on providing a complete ecosystem of products that seamlessly fit into the workflow of practitioners, pushing both AI and medicine forward,” - OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap
Still competition looms as digital health heavyweights like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon plug AI into their own healthcare offerings. Meanwhile well-funded international startups like Denmark’s Corti and France’s Nabla take a similar clinician-focused approach to Ambience.
But with marquee backers and early customer traction, Ambience believes its operating system model gives it an edge in harnessing AI to enhance both clinician wellbeing and health system performance.