Suki raises $70 million to build AI assistants for hospitals

Suki, a startup that provides artificial intelligence (AI) assistants for healthcare, has raised $70 million in a Series D round. Investors are betting on the adoption of AI-powered generative applications in the sector, the company told Reuters.

The funding round was led by London-based technology investment firm Hedosophia, with additional investments from Venrock and March Capital. This brings Suki's total funding to $165 million.

Soki, based in Redwood City, California, did not disclose its valuation, but a person familiar with the funding round said recent earnings valued the company at about $500 million.

Founded in 2017 by Puneet Soni, former Google and Flipkart executive, Suki is developing AI-powered voice assistants to reduce administrative burdens on healthcare providers. Its core products, Suki Assistant and Suki Platform, have seen increasing adoption since OpenAI's ChatGPT boom, as health systems across the country explore how the technology can better support doctors' clinical work.

“When the AI ​​trend started, every healthcare system wanted to have an AI strategy,” Soni said, adding that the company built its own technology stack by being early in the space.

The company has benefited from demand and says it has now partnered with more than a dozen health systems. Suki also boasts the most comprehensive integration of electronic health records (EHRs), partnering with Epic, Oracle-owned Cerner, Athena, and MEDITECH.

Sony said the latest funding will be used to accelerate product development, add more features to Assistant and develop tools to manage multiple AI models.

Suki competes with Microsoft-owned Nuance, whose Dragon Medical One is widely used for speech recognition and clinical documentation, as well as other startups like Abridge, which has raised $150 million from venture capital investors to train medical AI models .