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Published on
October 10, 2024
8 min read
Suki to Build AI Assistants for Health Systems with Latest Funding
AI assistants company, Suki has raised $70 million in a Series D funding round. Suki’s latest funding will enable the AI startup to build AI assistants for health systems in the US.
Suki’s AI funding pushes its total financing to $165 million, according to Reuters. Although the California-based company has not made its valuation public, sources close to the company say the latest funding pushed the company’s value to an estimated $500 million.
Early Health Sector Entry
Suki develops AI voice assistants that handle administrative tasks for healthcare providers. Suki Platform and Suki Assistant are its primary products. The Uptake of the two products in the healthcare sector has increased significantly since OpenAI launched ChatGPT.
The uptake of Suki AI assistants has also been driven by the need to integrate AI in healthcare systems. Across the US, healthcare facilities have been exploring ways to address employee burnout and support doctor’s clinical work with AI technology. Founded in 2017 by Punit Soni, Suki entered the health space early and developed a proprietary tech stack. Soni previously worked at Flipkart and Google.
“When the AI trend kicked in, every health system wanted to have an AI strategy,” Soni said.
Suki AI healthcare funding comes at a time when investors are betting on integration of generative AI in the health sector. The funding round attracted investments from Venrock and March Capital. It was led by Hedosophia, a tech investment firm based in London.
Building Partnerships
Suki has capitalized on the demand for AI tools in the healthcare sector to establish partnerships with various health systems. In 2023, Suki partnered with Meditech, one of America’s popular Electronic Health Records (EHR) system vendors.
Through this partnership, Suki has integrated its AI assistants into Meditech Expanse and expanded to new hospitals. Suki has also worked with Oracle-owned Cerner and Epic and integrated its AI tools in their health record systems. In April 2024, health facilities associated with Epic were impressed by Suki’s integration capabilities.
“We understand the profound impact that AI solutions can have on our clinicians as well as patient care and are excited to introduce Suki to our network. After using other AI documentation solutions, Suki stood out to us for its depth of integration with Epic, ability to do more than documentation, and competitive cost,” Bina Desai, M.D., and Chief Medical Informatics Officer of Rush said in a statement.
The startup plans to fast-track its product development process with the latest Suki AI startup funding. Suki comes with capabilities like note generation, dictation and coding, and can respond to questions through data retrieval. However, the company will be building more features into Suki AI assistants and developing tools for managing multiple AI models.
Stiff Competition
As Suki expands its AI product range, it faces stiff competition from startups such as Nuance, which is owned by Microsoft. Nuance developed Dragon Medical One, an AI assistant that is widely used for clinical documentation and speech recognition. Suki also competes against Abridge, a startup that is training medical AI models. Abridge raised $150 million in a Series C funding round from venture capital investors.
