Company Spotlight

Abridge: Using AI to Elevate the Clinician-Patient Conversation 

In a healthcare system drowning in paperwork and clinician burnout, Abridge offers a rare antidote: clarity and efficiency.

Founded in Pittsburgh in 2018 by cardiologist Dr. Shiv Rao, Abridge uses domain-specific generative AI to convert clinician-patient conversations into structured, accurate medical notes in real time--dramatically reducing the administrative burden that’s driving many physicians out of the profession.

“Doctors go to medical school to help people, not to write notes for half the day,” said Rao, whose own frustrations sparked the idea for Abridge. “We realized that if we could capture patient conversations accurately and intelligently, we could give clinicians their time back—and actually improve care.”

Post-pandemic, the physician workforce remains under siege—nearly half of doctors report burnout, with documentation demands cited as a leading cause. This pressure is only projected to grow with the aging population’s increasing demands for care. And the problems of documentation volume and complexity extend far beyond just clinicians—they also contribute to medical errors, impede care coordination and harm healthcare systems’ bottom lines. 

Abridge’s platform addresses this challenge with cutting-edge generative AI trained specifically on medical language. The system produces accurate, secure and compliant clinical documentation that integrates directly into electronic health records and translates into billing codes. Clinicians can review and finalize their notes in minutes, not hours.  

Adoption has been fast. Abridge’s platform is now used in more than 150 large health systems across the U.S., including Johns Hopkins Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan Kettering and Kaiser Permanente. The company projects that its AI will support over 50 million clinician-patient conversations in 2025 alone.

Investors have taken notice. In the first half of 2025, the company raised a staggering $500 million across its Series D and E venture funding rounds, with Andreessen Horowitz leading the most recent round and Khosla Ventures joining. Abridge plans to use the funds to fuel expansion into broader clinical workflows—from automating care coordination to streamlining revenue cycle management. 

“Every medical conversation is rich with the signals our healthcare system depends on,” said Rao. “Abridge activates those signals in the background, silently handling the complexity so clinicians can focus on the human interactions that matter most.”

Pittsburgh’s powerful convergence of world-class medical institutions, academic research and AI talent have provided fertile ground for Abridge’s creation and continued growth. Rao remains a practicing cardiologist at UPMC, while CTO/CSO Zack Lipton serves as a machine learning professor at Carnegie Mellon University—helping the company stay close to its innovation roots.

As AI transforms health care, Abridge stands out by solving one of the sector’s most pervasive problems: the breakdown of communication between physicians and patients. Its solution is elegant in concept, complex in execution, and—if its momentum is any indication—increasingly essential to the future of medicine.