Suki just raised $70 million for its healthcare AI assistant to beat out rival Abridge. See the 17-slide pitch deck it used. --[Reported by Umva mag]

• Suki just raised $70 million in Series D funding led by Hedosophia for its medical AI assistant.
• Suki's tech helps doctors with administrative tasks like notetaking and coding.
• It's competing with hot startups like Abridge as VCs scramble to place their bets in healthcare AI.

Punit Singh Soni started Suki back in 2017, well before the AI boom made its way to healthcare. Seven years later, his business is exploding.

Today, Suki has 300 health system and clinic clients using its AI assistant for administrative tasks. It's also notched partnerships with major electronic health records systems, including Epic, Cerner, Meditech, and Athenahealth.

Now, Suki is raising more money to supercharge its offerings. The startup just landed a $70 million Series D round led by Hedosophia, a secretive UK-based VC firm led by Ian Osborne.

Existing investors, including Venrock, March Capital, Flare Capital, Breyer Capital, and InHealth Ventures, also participated in the financing. The Series D round brings Suki's total funding to $165 million.

Suki is selling into a red-hot market for ambient clinical documentation tech. Its flagship product is an AI assistant that transcribes and summarizes patient-doctor interactions and helps clinicians with other administrative tasks like medical coding.

Ambient scribing is becoming indispensible for many health systems as hospitals struggle with margin pressures and clinician burnout. Numerous startups have raised cash for their own clinical documentation tech this year, including Ambience Healthcare, which raised a $70 million Series B co-led by Kleiner Perkins and the OpenAI Startup Fund in February, as well as Nabla, which announced a $24 million Series B in January.

Suki's biggest competitor is healthcare AI startup Abridge, which raised a $150 million Series C at a $850 million valuation in February and is backed by big names like Lightspeed Venture Partners and CVS Health Ventures.

One of the key differentiators between Suki and Abridge, Soni said, is the depth of Suki's EHR integrations. Abridge's tech has been deployed at many top health systems using Epic's EHR, Soni noted. But while Epic is the largest EHR vendor in the US, the company has less than 40% market share, and Soni said he's "never seen" Abridge working with other EHR companies like Meditech, Cerner, or Athenahealth.

"If you think the center of the universe is just the top 50 health systems in this Epic ecosystem, then Abridge is a really great competitor," he said.

An Abridge spokesperson said Abridge does work with Cerner through the startup's contract with the Veterans Health Administration.

Suki's newest product line sets it apart from Abridge, too — the startup has begun selling its AI platform to telehealth players, clinical communications companies, and EHRs to help those organizations build out their own solutions using Suki's AI tools, including its ambient documentation capabilities.

Soni said the startup currently has about five large customers using its platform product and plans to reveal at least three of those in the coming weeks. He said those announcements "will shake the industry because some of the biggest names in healthcare are going to be using us soon."

Suki plans to use its fresh Series D funding to build out AI infrastructure to support those partnerships, Soni said, as well as to expand its existing products and build new ones, such as AI assistants for healthcare staffing.

He emphasized that Suki is focused on developing AI responsibly, and with the "post-AI era" 10 years from now in mind, where he expects AI use in healthcare to look fundamentally different.

New entrants into the medical scribe market, he said, are "a small footnote in the long term."

Here's the pitch deck Suki used to raise $70 million from Hedosophia.

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