Clinical Generative AI Assistant Nabla Raises $24M
Generative AI assistant for healthcare providers Nabla has raised $24 million in a Series B funding round led by Cathay Innovation. Nabla is one of the mushrooming crop of AI startups that offers medical practitioners an ambient voice assistant powered by generative AI named Nabla Copilot. The AI assistant helps clinicians automate clinical documentation and other administrative tasks, from taking notes during patient conversations to electronic health record (EHR) system backups.
Nabla Copilot
As with Oracle, Suki, Abridge, or most clinical AI assistants, Nabla Copilot is designed to reduce the paperwork and form-filling necessary for modern healthcare. The assistant employs generative AI for taking notes, medical coding, and smooth EHR integrations. The result has been a much more streamlined record-keeping system with only very light checking and editing necessary.
Since Nabla Copilot came out last year, the startup claims to have signed up nearly 20,000 clinicians for the AI assistant and conducted more than three million annual patient visits through the platform in three languages. The new money more than doubles Nabla’s total funding to over $43 million since its 2018 founding. The funding will support the nationwide expansion of Nabla’s solutions to additional hospitals and practices. The company also plans to build out multilingual capabilities to improve health equity.
“This fundraise allows us to continue delivering on our vision to build the premier ambient AI assistant that will allow clinicians to experience the joy of practicing again,” said Nabla CEO Alex Lebrun. “Clinical documentation is only the beginning for Nabla. Health systems are looking to leverage the AI opportunity to support their healthcare teams in many different aspects; we are getting ready to be there every step of the way.”
Lebrun and other Nabla executives are former Facebook AI researchers. Lebrun ran a conversational AI startup named Wit.ai before Facebook acquired it in 2015. He and his team are part of a trend among conversational AI and healthcare technology startups looking for ways to connect. The demand, which spiked in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to help smaller companies attract investors. For instance, Layer Health recently raised $4 million to help healthcare providers, gather insights from scattered written medical records, while Abridge raised $30 million to boost its work aiding doctors by converting patient-clinician conversations into useful notes and filling out EHRs. International giants like Amazon Web Services (AWS) are keen to make their own clinical assistants, while Google released the MedLM LLM for a similar purpose based on its Gemini family of models. The Mayo Clinic has already been incorporating Google’s earlier Med-PaLM 2 LLM into its research hospital.
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