Abridge

Abridge is an ambient AI clinical documentation platform that turns patient and clinician conversations into structured, billable notes inside the EHR. Founded in 2018 by Shiv Rao, a practicing cardiologist, and Carnegie Mellon machine learning professor Zachary Lipton, the Pittsburgh company has become the enterprise leader in the category, named Best in KLAS for Ambient AI in both 2025 and 2026. It serves more than 250 health systems, including Kaiser Permanente across roughly 25,000 physicians, Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Duke Health, UPMC, and the VA, and has raised about $812 million, most recently a $300 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures at a $5.3 billion valuation, followed by a $316 million extension in April 2026.

The product's defining strength is depth inside Epic. Abridge embeds across Haiku, Canto, and Hyperdrive with bidirectional note sync, recognizes conversations in more than 28 languages, and covers 55 plus specialties across outpatient, inpatient, and emergency settings. Its Linked Evidence feature maps every part of a generated note back to the source audio, so a clinician can verify any sentence against what was actually said before signing. A contextual reasoning engine incorporates prior encounter data, clinical guidelines, and individual documentation style, and the platform has expanded into structured orders, coding context for revenue cycle teams, and real time prior authorization through a collaboration with Highmark Health and Allegheny Health Network.

Abridge is enterprise only. There is no self serve signup, no individual plan, and no public pricing; contracts are negotiated with health systems, and third parties estimate roughly $2,500 per clinician per year, with implementation scope and integration depth moving the number. For a large Epic health system, the procurement model is the point. For a solo clinician it is the wrong starting place. The evidence base is unusually strong for the category, including the largest independent peer reviewed study of ambient AI documentation, conducted with Kaiser Permanente across 1,306 clinicians and published in NEJM AI.