Suki, a startup that provides AI tools to help healthcare providers with documentation, billing and other administrative work, raised $70 million in a Series D funding round.
The round was led by Hedosophia and joined by Venrock, March Capital, Flare Capital, Breyer Capital and inHealth Ventures. It brings Suki’s total funding to $165 million. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
Venture firms have poured money into startups building AI tools to alleviate the busy work that burdens doctors and keeps them from spending more time with patients. Suki’s up against fierce competition, from Microsoft-backed Nuance to startups like Abridge, which raked in $150 million in new funding earlier this year.
As the market gets more crowded, these companies are finding ways to differentiate themselves, pushing beyond AI for drafting medical notes and summarizing visits and into improving doctors’ ability to code diagnoses to capture more revenue or surface insights from past medical records.
In an interview with Endpoints News, Suki founder and CEO Punit Soni likened the market for healthcare AI solutions to that of client relationship management (CRM) software, like Salesforce. There are tons of CRM companies, but only a few winners, he said. That’s how he expects the healthcare AI market to shake out.
“You can do a Google search and find cheap documentation products. You can find it for clinics. You can find copy/paste products. You can find everything, but at the end of the day, there are only two or three companies that actually can build an AI product that can be deployed at scale in these enterprises,” Soni said.
Winning in this market requires four things, he said. AI companies need to manage data securely and safely; work with all the major electronic health records; provide more than one point solution; and offer an AI platform that can power other companies’ products as well.
Suki’s main product is an AI assistant that’s sold to health systems that deploy it to their doctors. It can be used for documenting visits, summarizing notes, coding patient visits, and answering providers’ questions by retrieving data from the EHR. A doctor could ask the assistant to provide a patient’s blood sugar levels over the past few months, and to display it in a graph, Soni said, by way of example.
The company also sells Suki Platform, which powers the assistant, to other health tech companies that want to add AI to their offerings.
With the fresh funding, Soni said Suki will build more capabilities for the assistant and work on personalizing the experience for each individual doctor. The company is also building solutions specifically for nurses and other clinicians. It’s also planning to invest heavily in the platform side of the business.
“With the demand that’s at our doorstep of EHRs, large healthcare companies, large telehealth companies all coming up and saying, we need to use various portions of the Suki AI stack to add AI experiences to our product, it will have to become basically an entire company of its own in terms of what it does,” Soni said of the platform.
(This story is from our Health Tech newsletter. If you’d like to sign up, just click here.)