Ambience Healthcare
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Last reviewed
Jun 7, 2026
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18 citations
Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,727 words
Add missing citations, update stale details, or suggest a clearer explanation.
Ambience Healthcare is an American artificial intelligence company that builds ambient clinical documentation, medical coding, and clinical documentation integrity (CDI) software for hospitals and large physician groups. Founded in 2020 and based in San Francisco, the company sells an enterprise AI platform for healthcare that listens to patient visits, drafts clinical notes, suggests billing codes, and flags documentation gaps. It competes in the fast-growing market for ambient AI scribes against rivals such as Abridge, Microsoft's Nuance DAX Copilot, and Suki. Ambience is closely tied to OpenAI: the OpenAI Startup Fund has backed it since its early rounds, and the company says its products are built on OpenAI models. In July 2025 it raised a $243 million Series C that valued the company at about $1.25 billion, one of the largest health-technology rounds of that year.
Ambience markets itself as an "AI operating system" for healthcare organizations rather than a single-purpose scribe. Its software pairs ambient documentation (turning the spoken conversation of a clinical encounter into a structured note) with downstream revenue-cycle features, including real-time coding assistance and CDI, which checks that the finished documentation supports the diagnosis and billing codes attached to a visit. According to the company, the platform supports more than 100 ambulatory subspecialties, emergency departments, and inpatient specialties, and is used by health systems across the United States.
The company has emphasized enterprise deployments at brand-name academic and large community systems rather than selling primarily to individual clinicians or small practices. Named customers include Cleveland Clinic, UCSF Health, Houston Methodist, and Memorial Hermann Health System. In KLAS Research evaluations cited by the company and by Becker's Hospital Review, Ambience reported a customer satisfaction score of 97.7, with high marks for product quality and responsiveness.
Ambience Healthcare was founded in 2020 by Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma, who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According to TechCrunch, the pair had previously co-founded an AI diagnostics startup, Remedy Health, which wound down in 2020, and both cited personal experiences with the healthcare system as motivation for building clinician-facing software. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
For most of its history Mike Ng served as chief executive officer and Nikhil Buduma as chief scientist. On September 22, 2025, the company announced a leadership transition: Buduma stepped into the CEO role to lead day-to-day operations, product, and growth, while Ng moved to the full-time role of president and chairman, focusing on long-term strategy. Both remain co-founders and active executives.
Ambience's platform is organized around a set of clinician and revenue-integrity tools that share a common ambient capture layer. Its documentation product, AutoScribe, generates a draft clinical note from the natural conversation between clinician and patient for the clinician to review and approve. Around that core, the company has built features reported by TechCrunch and described on its own site, including AutoCDI for clinical documentation integrity, AutoRefer to streamline specialist referrals and handoffs, AutoAVS to produce patient-facing after-visit summaries, and AutoPrep to assemble context ahead of upcoming appointments.
The coding and compliance side is what most distinguishes Ambience from documentation-only scribes. The company describes an ICD-10 assistant and a real-time compliance engine that map a visit's narrative to appropriate ICD-10 diagnosis codes and CPT procedure codes, surfacing gaps or mismatches at the point of care rather than after the fact. In 2025 Ambience extended CDI into the inpatient setting; on September 30, 2025 it announced what it called the first ambient AI platform to launch inpatient CDI at the point of care, a release the company said is built on OpenAI's models. A companion inpatient tool, "Conditions Advisor," is intended to prompt clinicians toward more complete documentation of a patient's conditions during a hospital stay. The platform integrates into electronic health record (EHR) workflows, including native integration with major EHR systems used by its health-system customers.
The company's relationship with OpenAI runs through both technology and capital. The OpenAI Startup Fund co-led Ambience's 2024 Series B and participated in its 2025 Series C, and Ambience has repeatedly described its products as built on OpenAI foundation models, placing it among the more prominent OpenAI-aligned vertical application companies in healthcare. As with most commercial ambient-AI vendors, the exact model versions and architecture are not publicly disclosed.
Ambience's customer roster grew sharply through 2024 and 2025 as health systems moved ambient AI from pilots to enterprise rollouts. Cleveland Clinic announced on February 19, 2025 that it would roll out Ambience's platform to U.S. ambulatory providers in phases, after evaluating the software across more than 80 specialties during a 2024 pilot; the system covers documentation, CDI, and point-of-care coding, and lets patients opt out. In April 2025, Ambience and Houston Methodist announced a collaboration to bring the platform into higher-acuity emergency and inpatient settings, which Becker's Hospital Review described as a first-of-its-kind effort to extend ambient AI beyond the clinic.
Other reported deployments include UCSF Health, Memorial Hermann, John Muir Health, Boise-based St. Luke's Health System, The Oncology Institute, GI Alliance, Midi Health, and Eventus WholeHealth. Ardent Health announced an enterprise-wide rollout of Ambience's documentation, coding, and clinical-workflow tools across its hospitals and clinics, and regional systems such as Onvida Health have announced partnerships. By the time of its Series C, Ambience said it served leading health systems across the country, with reporting placing its customer base at more than 100 organizations.
The company has paired these announcements with growth metrics. According to data compiled by Sacra and reported by Becker's Hospital Review, Ambience reached roughly $30 million in annual recurring revenue by May 2025, up from about $19 million at the end of 2024.
Ambience has raised capital from a mix of top-tier venture firms, healthcare-focused investors, and strategic backers. Its seed round in 2020 drew support from Kleiner Perkins, the OpenAI Startup Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz, and it raised a Series A in 2022 led by Andreessen Horowitz. On February 6, 2024 the company announced a $70 million Series B co-led by Kleiner Perkins and the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Optum Ventures; TechCrunch reported the round brought total funding to about $100 million.
On July 29, 2025 Ambience announced a $243 million Series C co-led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors the OpenAI Startup Fund, Kleiner Perkins, and Optum Ventures joined by new investors including Frist Cressey Ventures, Town Hall Ventures, Smash Capital, Georgian, and Founders Circle Capital. Multiple outlets, including STAT, Becker's Hospital Review, and Modern Healthcare, reported the round valued the company at about $1.25 billion and brought total funding raised to roughly $345 million.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
| Founders | Mike Ng, Nikhil Buduma |
| CEO | Nikhil Buduma (from September 2025; Ng became president and chairman) |
| Sector | AI clinical documentation, medical coding, CDI |
| Series A | 2022, led by Andreessen Horowitz |
| Series B | February 2024, $70 million, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and the OpenAI Startup Fund |
| Series C | July 2025, $243 million, co-led by Oak HC/FT and Andreessen Horowitz |
| Valuation | About $1.25 billion (July 2025) |
| Total raised | About $345 million |
| Selected customers | Cleveland Clinic, UCSF Health, Houston Methodist, Memorial Hermann |
Ambience is one of the leading companies in the rapid rise of ambient AI for clinical documentation, a category that uses large language models and speech recognition to reduce the administrative burden that contributes to clinician burnout. STAT reported that 2025 funding announcements for ambient-AI documentation companies reached nearly $1 billion, with Ambience's Series C and Abridge's even larger 2025 raises driving much of the total. Abridge was named Best in KLAS for ambient AI in 2025 and 2026, underscoring how competitive the segment has become among vendors that also include Nuance DAX Copilot, Suki, Nabla, DeepScribe, and Augmedix.
Within that field, Ambience's strategy stands out for two reasons. First, it has pushed beyond note-writing into coding and CDI, tying its product to hospitals' revenue integrity and compliance rather than clinician convenience alone, which gives health systems a clearer financial case for adoption. Second, it has concentrated on large enterprise deployments, including emergency and inpatient care, where documentation is more complex and the regulatory stakes are higher than in routine ambulatory visits. Combined with its close ties to OpenAI, those choices have made Ambience a closely watched test of whether AI scribes can move from productivity tool to core clinical and financial infrastructure inside major health systems.