Healthcare AI startup Heidi Health just closed a $65 million Series B led by billionaire Steve Cohen's Point72, marking one of the largest funding rounds in the medical scribe space this year. The round comes as the company claims to have saved doctors over 18 million hours across 70 million patient visits in just 18 months since launch.
The healthcare AI revolution just got a major injection of capital. Heidi Health, the medical scribe startup founded by trauma surgeon Dr. Tom Kelly, landed a $65 million Series B from Steve Cohen's Point72 - and it's easy to see why investors are betting big on automating healthcare's most tedious tasks.
Dr. Kelly's pitch is simple but powerful: doctors are drowning in paperwork, and AI can throw them a lifeline. "We wanted to build an AI care partner that would stand alongside clinicians and take care of the admin so that individual providers, like me, can feel empowered to deliver the care which we dedicated our lives to," Kelly told TechCrunch.
The numbers tell the story of a company hitting serious scale. Since launching products in early 2024, Heidi Health claims to have returned "18 million hours to frontline healthcare providers from more than 70 million patient visits in 116 countries." That's the kind of traction that gets legendary investors like Cohen - who built a $30 billion hedge fund empire - to write big checks.
Point72's enthusiasm stems from what they saw under the hood. "They had seen all the scribes before," Dr. Kelly explained. "They'd never seen product adoption and usage metrics like they'd seen in Heidi. They also loved that we were obsessed about the end user experience, because they saw most of our competitors were just doing top-down sales."
The timing couldn't be better. Healthcare systems worldwide are grappling with physician burnout, with administrative tasks eating up to 40% of doctors' time. Heidi Health's AI medical scribe tackles the grunt work - transcribing notes, generating patient summaries, and tracking tasks so doctors can ditch their sticky note systems.
But Heidi Health isn't just another transcription tool. The company takes a model-agnostic approach, building its own AI while also leveraging models like Google's Gemini. "This model agnostic approach means that we can optimize our accuracy, latency, and cost," Kelly noted. It's a smart hedge against the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
The fresh funding comes with some serious firepower joining the team. Dr. Simon Kos, Microsoft's former Chief Medical Officer, is coming aboard, along with Plaid's head of revenue Paul Williamson. That's the kind of enterprise software and healthcare expertise that could accelerate path to becoming the dominant platform in medical AI.
