Suki banks $70M to build out AI assistants for doctors, expands health system partnerships

Suki, a voice-assistive AI and medical scribe tool, secured $70 million in fresh funding to build out its AI assistant technology for doctors and hospitals.

Founded in 2017, Suki has been rapidly growing as it inks more partnerships with health systems, health tech companies and electronic health record (EHR) solutions.

“We are in a new phase of growth,” Punit Soni, CEO and founder of Suki, said in a statement.  “The healthcare industry is clamoring for AI and we are proud to offer a suite of full-featured solutions that seamlessly interoperate with existing tools. With the support of our investors, we’ll accelerate our growth, diversify Suki’s capabilities, and deepen relationships with strategic partners such as MedStar Health, one of the most important collaborators in Suki’s history."

The company also announced an expansion of its partnership with MedStar Health, a $7.7 billion health system with more than 300 care locations. 

The agreement makes Suki’s flagship solution Suki Assistant available to thousands of MedStar Health clinicians across ambulatory specialties including primary care, cardiology and gastroenterology as well as settings like urgent care locations. Suki will not be rolled out to all 300 MedStar locations right now but will be deployed in phases.

The integration will be the largest rollout of generative AI for the largest healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C., region, according to the organizations.

"As MedStar Health explores and deploys artificial intelligence capabilities that can revolutionize healthcare delivery, Suki has served as a critical partner in our ongoing journey for more than four years,” said Jeff Collins, vice president of the MedStar Institute for Innovation Business Innovation Lab, in a statement. “Together we have delivered new value to our system through successful pilot exploration, workflow optimization, and continued co-development. Importantly, we have also supported a wide range of providers who report that using Suki vastly improves how they interact with the EHR and elevates their documentation efficiency, improves the patient experience, and bolsters professional satisfaction.”

Soni said MedStar Health was fundamental in helping Suki build essential capabilities including its bidirectional and seemingly "invisible" EHR integration.

Suki Assistant uses AI and voice technologies to help clinicians save time on time-consuming, tedious administrative tasks. The AI assistant uses generative AI to automatically create clinical documentation by ambiently listening to patient-clinician conversations. It also takes dictation and commands, simplifies coding and answers clinical questions by retrieving relevant chart data from the EHR, according to the company.

Suki’s products are designed to augment existing workflows and accommodate pre-charting, incorporating live chart data such as vitals into notes and generating patient instructions, executives said.

Suki claims that health systems experience completion of notes up to 72% faster while increasing documentation quality, improving clinician well-being and enhancing revenue capture. Further, the company touts a 70% adoption rate among clinicians.

Suki’s mission is to make healthcare technology invisible and assistive with an AI platform, Soni said.

The company says it integrates with major EHR companies including Epic, Oracle Cerner, Meditech and Athenahealth. 

Suki also developed an AI and speech platform, Suki Platform, as a suite of developer tools to enable customers to create a wide range of AI voice experiences with minimal development effort. Suki Platform is used by EHRs, telehealth companies and clinical communications companies, the company said.

The company will use the fresh capital to invest in new product development, with plans to expand beyond its existing offerings, Soni said.

The company is focused on expanding Suki Assistant's skills. "We want Suki to be a true assistant to the doctors to do more administrative and clinical support work for them," he said, noting tasks like pre-visit summaries and order entry.

Suki also is working to expand Suki's capabilities to support other healthcare professionals such as nurses, he noted.

The series D funding round brings the company’s total funding to $165 million. The round was led by Hedosophia, with a substantial additional investment from Venrock, as well as participation by existing investors including March Capital, Flare Capital, Breyer Capital and inHealth Ventures. Suki raised $55 million in a series C round in 2021.

Suki also will use the funding to invest in commercial initiatives and hiring to expand its leadership team. 

Bryan Roberts, partner at Venrock, said Suki has grown exponentially through strategic partnerships and is "well on its way to becoming the de facto AI platform for healthcare." More than a dozen major health systems and hospitals deployed or expanded access to Suki in the last two months alone. The company's technology is being used by 300-plus healthcare providers, Soni said.

Suki doubled its revenue in 2023 and is on track to quadruple its revenue in 2024, according to Soni.

"I expect that the platform business will grow from a single-digit percentage of our revenue to about 33% of our revenue by next year, but will actually become greater than 50% of our overall revenue by 2026. It's a massively going segment for us," he said.

Soni noted that the AI medical assistant sector is a "noisy" market with a growing list of companies offering AI capabilities. 

"I think AI in healthcare as a SaaS [software-as-a-service] sector is going to be here to stay now and there's going to be different business areas. There's going to be the enterprise systems, obviously segmented by EHRs, epic seller, and maritime Athena. Then they're going to be these groups and SMB [small and midsize business] sector, and then there's going to be a platform sector where a lot of healthcare tech companies are going to say they want an AI platform to help them build AI experiences," Soni said. "This is the year where we have gone from just working with Suki Assistant with health systems to actually building across the entire ecosystem."

Building on its Meditech integration, Suki recently deployed its technology in more than a dozen health systems.

"The Suki Platform business, where we provide a few lines of code and you can embed the entire assistant into your EHR, is really taking off," Soni said. "What we are seeing is a large number of EHRs coming to us and just basically collaborating to bring the AI assistant into their EHR, and that allows them to bring that AI functionality to their doctors and users directly." 

He added, "There's a lot of large tech companies that are starting to work with us to either add dictation to their products, add voice commands to their products or add ambient voice tech to their products. There is significant traction there."

Along with health systems, Suki is partnering with health tech companies and other stakeholders. It integrated its AI assistant with Amwell's Converge telehealth platform, which is used by more than 55 health plans. Suki also recently inked a national group purchasing agreement with Premier, a healthcare improvement company that represents 4,350 hospitals and health systems.

The company also partners with nearly a dozen federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) and community health centers (CHCs). 

Venture capital has been pouring into AI-powered medical scribe companies. In February 2024, Abridge raised $150 million in a series C funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Earlier this year, Nabla raised $24 million in a series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation.