AI-Native Healthcare: 100M Doctor Visits, 10–20 Hours Saved, Prior Auth in Minutes — Janie Lee & Chai Asawa, Abridge
type: NewsArticle
description: Abridge, the AI-native healthcare company founded in 2018, is projected to support over 80 million patient-clinician conversations this year across 250 U.S. health systems, saving doctors 10–20 hours per week on clinical documentation. The company has raised $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation and is expanding from ambient scribing into real-time clinical decision support, prior authorization, and payer workflows. By focusing on the conversation between patient and clinician as the highest-stakes workflow in healthcare, Abridge aims to reduce clerical burden, speed up approvals, and improve patient outcomes across 28 languages and 50 specialties.
date published: 2026-05-14 22:05:31+00:00
date modified: 2026-05-25 00:19:42.870464+00:00
language: en
is accessible for free: true
article body: *Special discounts up for AIE Melbourne (LS discount) and AIE World’s Fair (group discounts up to 25% - CFPs still open for Autoresearch and Vertical AI) Cya there!* Abridge **did not** start as an “GPT wrapper”. It was founded in 2018, years before the Cambrian explosion of AI application layer companies. OpenAI launched ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022 and by then, ** Abridge** had already spent years doing the unglamorous work of building trust for one of the highest context, most important workflows in healthcare: **the conversation between a patient and a clinician.** Abridge’s original wedge was **clinical documentation**. Listen to the visit, generate the note, reduce the clerical burden, and let clinicians spend more time with patients instead of the EHR. By focusing on how doctors actually document, how health systems actually buy, how EHR integration actually works, how clinicians verify outputs, and how missing context during a visit turns into downstream friction across billing, prior authorization, quality, and follow-up, **the adoption of LLMs became a force multiplier** on a workflow already optimized for sensitive context gathering. The company has scaled fast: Abridge says it is projected to support **80M+ patient-clinician conversations** this year across **250** large and complex U.S. health systems, with support for **28+ languages** and **50+ specialties**. It raised [$300M at a $5.3B valuation](https://www.abridge.com/blog/series-e)[ in June 2025](https://www.abridge.com/blog/series-e), after a [$250M round earlier that year](https://www.abridge.com/blog/series-d). Today, **Janie Lee** and **Chaitanya “Chai” Asawa** of Abridge join us for [another crossover pod](https://www.latent.space/p/unsupervised-learning-2026) with **Redpoint’s** **Jacob** **Effron** (who is on the board of Abridge) to dive into how Abridge is building the clinical intelligence layer for healthcare starting with ambient documentation, then expanding into clinical dec…
publisher: Web Pulse
keywords: ai-startups, ai-products, natural-language-processing, large-language-models, generative-ai
mentions: Abridge
mentions: Janie Lee
mentions: Chai Asawa
mentions: OpenAI
mentions: ChatGPT
mentions: AIE Melbourne
mentions: AIE World's Fair
citation: CreativeWork