Abridge, Co-founded by Cardiologist Shiv Rao, Valued at $5.3 billion
Shiv Rao, co-founder of U.S. medical AI startup Abridge, switched from studying history to medicine
July 3, 2025
Last week, Abridge raised $300 million in a funding round which valued the medical startup at $5.3 billion, more than double the value from its previous funding just four months earlier. “This is fuel for the decades long journey ahead of us,” Shiv Rao, Co-founder and Chief Executive of the San Francisco based company stated in a post on LinkedIn.
Abridge’s software, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), records and summarizes patient-clinician conversations. The note drafts are in formats that accelerate record keeping for medical staff, information for patients, and generates codes and related billing information required by insurers and other medical payers.
At hospitals and other medical centers in the United States, incomplete clinical notes delay billing processes, resulting in additional hours being spent on modifying documents to meet requirements of the payers, often weeks or months after a patient visit. Using speech, voice, and language technologies, Abridge’s models “know what needs to be documented for various specialties, and any patient, so the right information gets captured while care is happening—not after the fact,” improving administrative efficiencies and reducing costs, Rao, 46-years-old, states in a post.
Abridge supports 28 languages and 55 medical specialties, including at outpatient, emergency, and inpatient facilities. It is used by more than 50,000 physicians and nurses at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Yale New Haven Health, John Hopkins Medicine, Mayo Clinic, and more than 150 other health systems in the U.S. About half of the users work at Kaiser Permanante, a non-profit health insurance and medical coverage provider in California. Abridge is expected to record more than 50 million medical conversations this year.
In 2018, Abridge emerged from the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, a collaboration in Pittsburgh between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh that seeks to apply machine learning to health care challenges. The startup, with UPMC as an early investor, was co-founded by Shiv Rao, Sandeep Konam, and Florian Metze, according to UPMC.com.
Rao realized the value of documenting patient physician conversations after he came across a patient, with a ten-year history of breast cancer, who was comforted knowing that her husband was recording her conversations with physicians, Rao told Today’s Care Giver.
Since 2013, Shivdev (Shiv) Rao has been a cardiologist and is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He joined the center in 2012 as an academic fellow. From 2015 to 2019, he worked on the center’s investments in medical startups.
Rao completed his medical education at the University of Pittsburgh. During his residency in internal medicine, at the University of Michigan, 2007-2010, he learned how to code and created an app. He earned a BA in history, with a minor in minority studies, from Carnegie Mellon, 1997-2001. He took classes in fine arts, skateboarded, and programmed experimental sound pieces that were performed in art venues across the East Coast of the U.S. “I was every Indian parent's nightmare for most of undergrad until I wasn't,” he told Osmosis.org.
Rao got interested in healthcare technology after learning about a surgical platform developed by an ophthalmologist to treat millions of people in India with cataracts.
Florian Metze, an Associate Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon, stayed on at Abridge for 20 months, as co-founder, according to his LinkedIn profile. Since 2019, he is a Research Scientist Manager at Meta, parent of Facebook.
“I co-founded Abridge to help everyone stay on top of their health,” states Sandeep Konam on his GitHub site. He was the startup’s chief technology officer. He earned an MS in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon, 2015-2017. Konam does not list his other education details on his site or on his LinkedIn profile.
Abridge’s site identifies Rao and Zachary Lipton, as co-founders. Lipton took over as the startup’s chief technology officer in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Earlier, from 2019, he was a research scientist and then chief scientific officer at Abridge. From 2017 to 2023, he was a “Mad Scientist” at Amazon AI Labs in Palo Alto, California. Lipton is an associate professor in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon. He earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, 2013-2017, and a BA in math and economics from Columbia University, New York, 2003-2007.
in 2024, startups using AI to tackle healthcare issues got $7.5 billion in funding from venture and other investors, according to Crunchbase. Already, in the first half of this year, such startups have attracted $5.6 billion in investments.
So far, Abridge has raised a total of $758 million in six funding rounds, according to Tracxn. Last week’s funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Menlo Park, California, venture firm has backed several startups which grew into major companies, including Facebook, Airbnb, and OpenAI, which has a valuation of $300 billion.
Another investor in Abridge’s latest funding round was Khosla Ventures. In a blog post, Vinod Khosla, founder of the firm, states, “AI conversations are able to engage, diagnose, and monitor patients, all while patiently understanding their issues. Applying advanced diagnostic reasoning, a deep understanding of the latest medical research (including its limitations of applicability), and superior analysis of interactions between conditions, events, lifestyles, and social determinants is now economically feasible.”
The eager interest of investors to fund Abridge is not surprising. Every year, the U.S. healthcare system spends nearly $1.5 trillion on administrative costs. A significant portion of that cost is tied to clinical and patient billing documentation, which Abridge and several competitors are seeking to reduce through automation using AI.
Apparently, the demand from healthcare systems for accurate billing documentation led Abridge to pivot - shift its focus - to billing solutions from its initial goal of documenting clinician-patient conversations. Also, clinicians are typically reluctant to record their conversations with patients. For instance, less than a third - 800 - of Yale New Haven Health System’s roughly 3,000 physicians are actively using Abridge’s platform, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In fact, Rao noted this reluctance of clinicians when describing why his family experience also partly inspired him to found Abridge. He told Osmosis.org, in 2020, about his wife and his experience when, for years, they went through an in vitro fertilization journey to have a healthy child; they have twin boys. His wife would often come back from medical visits with no idea what happened. Sometimes, “when you're going through something, it's so hard to capture the details” of a conversation with a clinician, Rao said. “But some portion of the time I realized they weren't telling her actually, and sometimes the incentives aren't aligned within the system to actually talk to your patients about what's actually happening.”
However, given the major potential cost savings from efficiently documenting accurate billing information, it appears that healthcare systems are pushing clinicians to record their conversations with patients. And, given the massive potential market, including from integrating patient and billing information with electronic medical and health records, Abridge faces several competitors. A leading competitor is Nuance which was bought by Microsoft in 2022 for $20 billion. Other competitors include Ambience Healthcare, Suki AI, Onpoint Healthcare Partners, Nabla, CodaMetrix and a feature from Epic Systems, the leading provider of electronic health records.
Abridge’s subscription licenses are priced at about $210 per clinician per month, according to Sacra, a research firm. This places Abridge between lower-cost competitors like Nabla at $119 per month and premium offerings like Nuance’s DAX Copilot at $600 per month.
In the first quarter of 2025, Abridge reportedly had an annual revenue run rate of $117 million, according to TechCrunch. It has more than 350 employees, according to PitchBook. Currently is has 56 open positions in San Francisco, New York, Pittsburgh, and other parts of the U.S.
There is an overlap between working on startups and medicine, Rao told Fortune. “I like the acuity of life or death situations—the more pressure, the better.” When a patient is in a critical state, you have to quickly find “which medication might work, deploy that medication, and get feedback…in the startup world, the feedback is that the product sucks and you need to iterate.”