Here's the exclusive pitch deck Ambience Healthcare used to raise $243 million as the AI scribing gold rush hits new highs
Ambience Healthcare
- Ambience Healthcare raised $243 million in Series C funding in July from A16z and Oak HC/FT.
- It's facing ever-hotter competition in AI scribing from startups like Abridge to giants like Epic.
- Ambience says it's rapidly building new products to automate all administrative tasks for providers.
The race to dominate AI-powered medical transcription is speeding up.
Ambience Healthcare just landed a fresh megaround of funding to accelerate its growth. The startup pulled in a $243 million Series C round at the end of July, co-led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz.
San Francisco-based Ambience sells ambient transcription software to summarize conversations between doctors and patients. Increasingly, Ambience is also automating the many administrative steps that follow, like medical coding and payment processing.
It's one of the best-funded players in a sector awash with investor cash: In the first half of 2025, US healthcare AI startups pulled in 62% of the $6.4 billion invested across digital health, according to Rock Health.
A16z is a previous investor in Ambience, first backing the company's Series A, according to PitchBook. But the firm surprised the industry this summer by making a new investment into Ambience's closest competitor, $5.3 billion Abridge. A16z led Abridge's $300 million Series E just a month before Ambience's raise.
The firm's double-dipping, a practice that's usually taboo in venture capital, underscores just how frenzied the Silicon Valley gold rush for healthcare AI scribes has become. And the industry is about to face a big shake-up — electronic health records giant Epic plans to release its own AI scribe this month, Politico reported.
Epic didn't respond to requests for comment on the reports. Cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma said in a statement to Business Insider that Ambience is "looking forward to the announcement," arguing that the launch will help Ambience further stand out from the crowd as the startup helps complex academic health systems save money across a range of capabilities.
"Epic entering the game will likely help reduce the amount of noise in our market by accelerating the consolidation of low-cost, low-value players who haven't shown the ability to extend beyond simple ambulatory specialties," he said.
Ambience was always intended to be more than an AI scribing startup, cofounder and CEO Michael Ng told Business Insider. When the startup raised its seed round in 2020, it included two products in its pitch deck that it planned to build in tandem: one for ambient scribing, and one that would use AI to derive medical codes from clinical notes — a critical step in ensuring doctors get paid by insurance companies for the care they provide.
Ambience has over 40 health system customers, including top players like the Cleveland Clinic and Memorial Hermann Health System, and all of them use its scribing tool. The startup has released adjacent products for medical coding and other administrative tasks that its founders say are easy for providers to add on. It's also automating referrals, pre-visit patient summaries, and medical orders like lab tests and prescriptions.
When asked about A16z's investment in Abridge, Ng said A16z doesn't sit on Ambience's board, and praised general partner Julie Yoo, who he said has provided crucial support to Ambience from its earliest stages. "It's hard for us to speak on other parts of the other funds that decided to make their own choices," he said.
Ambience's existing investors, The OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Optum Ventures, also participated in its Series C.
While Ambience has substantially expanded its product lines in the five years since its founding, Ng said the company has built about 10% of the offerings on its road map. But as the tech accelerates, Buduma said, Ambience is a year or two away from fully automating all administrative tasks for providers.
"We're sitting here with a clear line of sight to a world where a clinician walks into the room, you can have a conversation with the patient, and everything else is automated in the background by the AI platform," said Buduma. "All of a sudden, you're liberated from the keyboard, and you just get to talk to the patient in front of you."