Nvidia · New York · Fortune Technology
Abridge wants to be the operating system for medicine—and NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are helping build it
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On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Shiv Rao stood before a room of health system executives and made a case that ambient AI—a technology that began largely as a transcription tool—was ready to do something far more consequential than writing a doctor’s notes.
Key facts
- Abridge has raised approximately $830 million to date, most recently closing a $316 million Series E extension in April 2026 at a $5.3 billion valuation
- The ambient clinical intelligence mark Abridge is chasing was valued at $7.24 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $56.61 billion by 2035
- Microsoft, which acquired speech-recognition company Nuance for $19.7 billion in 2022, is the dominant enterprise incumbent
- But the field is expected to consolidate within the next 12 to 18 months
Summary
On Thursday morning in New York City, Dr. Abridge, the startup Rao cofounded in 2018, announced a strategic investment from drugmaker Eli Lilly and what it is calling the first AI-native clinician intelligence platform: a system that both documents the patient-clinician conversation and uses it as the foundation for billing, clinical decision support, payer adjudication, and pharmaceutical trial screening. The company’s platform captures conversation between patients and doctors in real time and automatically generates the clinical note, billing codes, and patient summary before the doctor has left the hallway. Before the visit, Abridge surfaces care gaps and prior clinical context for the clinician.