Shiv Rao has always been really clear with me about what the best thing about being a doctor is.
In February, when I profiled Rao—CEO and cofounder of Abridge, and a practicing cardiologist—he told me that it was growing old with your patients, living a full life together. Rao himself has multiple lives, still showing up to take on clinical shifts and building Abridge, a healthcare AI startup that’s made its name in medical transcription. We catch up because Abridge is barreling towards its future rapidly—the company just raised a $300 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures.
“You grow old with your patients as a clinician, and that’s such an incredible privilege that doctors and nurses get,” said Rao. “In this new life, I think we’re growing old with all of our partners. It’s a different altitude. As we grow old with Kaiser, we’re growing old with 26,000 clinicians at Kaiser, and the several millions of patients that those clinicians serve. That kind of impact is part of this fundraise: This is a decades-long journey with our partners, and we wanted to be able to explicitly say that they can rely upon us for the long journey.”
The company is now valued at $5.3 billion, and is in more than 150 enterprise health systems. Abridge has venture-backed competition—including Nabla, which in June raised a $70 million HV Capital-led Series C, and Ambience, whose backers include Kleiner Perkins and a16z. Abridge’s scale and growth, however, is indisputable—when I wrote about Abridge in February, the company’s valuation at its Series D was $2.75 billion. The natural question, at this point, becomes: What about an IPO?
“At this point in time, the amount of capital that we’ve got in the bank, the amount that we’re going to invest into R&D, I think we need to preserve all the optionality in the world,” said Rao. “Whether it’s to go public or to stay private for longer, from my vantage point, we should be optimizing for the mission and whatever is going to get us there. If there comes a time when that’s the right thing to do for the mission, then that’s the right thing to do. But at least at this point in time, it just feels like we’ve got decades of runway.”
Rao believes that the future of AI in healthcare is one that makes doctors’ and nurses’ lives easier, streamlines billing, and honors the doctor-patient relationship.
“We started this company with a thesis we still believe: We’re not going to fully automate a doctor or a nurse in the next five to ten years,” said Rao. “We still absolutely believe that. And if that’s true, then conversation, spoken dialogue, will continue to drive so many workflows in healthcare, including documentation. We’ve also now started to demonstrate a secret hiding in plain sight—that providers are compensated for the care that they document, not the care that they deliver. And doing right by these notes and documents, is doing right by revenue cycle. So, whether we put it on our website or not—we’re starting to—we’re a revenue cycle company, along with the other things we do.”
Figma!…While Rao may not sound like he’s in a hurry to go public, there is some news on the IPO front—Figma has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Read our FIG analysis here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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