Ambience Healthcare — a San Francisco-based startup offering an AI‑powered documentation and coding platform — closed a $243 million Series C funding round on Tuesday led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz.
The company, founded in 2020, also gained unicorn status, reaching a valuation of $1.25 billion. This marks the second-highest valuation among AI startups in the clinical documentation and coding space, following Abridge’s $5.3 billion valuation.
Ambience’s technology seeks to eliminate the “tens of thousands of daily clicks and keystrokes” clinicians have to deal with in order to provide care, said Mike Ng, the startup’s co-founder and CEO. The platform is designed to reduce clinicians’ administrative burden by automating documentation and streamlining things like billing and prior authorization.
“Health systems need AI now more than ever before — we have 10,000 seniors aging into Medicare every single day. There’s a projected shortage of 100,000 healthcare workers over the next decade, and there is immense financial pressure to do more with less, given the tightening budgets across Medicare, Medicaid and the NIH,” Ng declared.
Yet, most clinicians spend only about a quarter of their time actually caring for patients, he noted. The ultimate goal of automating routine, time-consuming tasks, he added, is to give time back so clinicians can focus more on patient care.
Ng also pointed out that the ambient AI space is expanding beyond straightforward specialties like primary care, urgent care and internal medicine.
“Investors are looking for companies who have built high-quality solutions that have the ability to serve healthcare workers holistically, even in some of the most complex care settings, which previously have been incredibly hard to serve,” he stated.
Ambience is investing heavily in fine-tuning its platform to handle complex specialties, which Ng believes can help the company stand out from other startups in the space, such as Abridge, DeepScribe and Suki.
He noted that while AI holds great promise for improving healthcare, applying it effectively in real-world clinical settings is often challenging because off-the-shelf foundation models quickly run out of medical knowledge.
“Internally, we have built a large AI and clinical research team collaborating with foundation model makers just on that piece alone. But it’s much more than just training AI to better understand medicine — it’s also about workflow, and understanding that it’s a continuing process to make sure we perform well across the various use cases that we encounter in real-world patient care,” Ng explained.
To do this, Ambience partners closely with providers like Cleveland Clinic and tech companies like OpenAI to codevelop tools that feel intuitive for clinicians, he added.
This high degree of attention to usability leads to higher clinician adoption rates, noted Nikhil Buduma, Ambience’s chief scientist and other co-founder. He referenced a six-month study Cleveland Clinic conducted last year in which it pitted five different ambient scribes against each other, with Ambience coming out on top.
Ambience had an 80% clinician utilization rate — double the next best — and a Net Promoter Score of 60, which later rose to 87 after further improvements, Buduma stated. By contrast, he said most competitors had NPS scores near zero or negative.
To Buduma, this performance stems from Ambience’s holistic approach. Rather than offering isolated tools, the startup built a unified platform that integrates pre-visit prep, ambient scribing and revenue cycle workflows — all of which helps to ensure consistency and compliance, he noted.
Overall, as the ambient scribe market grows increasingly crowded, Ambience is aiming to differentiate itself by going deeper, not just broader, into healthcare.
Looking ahead, the startup has no plans to exit any time soon, as Ng said “still in the first inning” and has “so much more to build.”
Photo: Thanakorn Lappattaranan, Getty Images
