Dr. Tom Kelly is a trauma surgeon who observes doctors overwhelmed by administrative tasks. He sought to create a change and decided to build a solution. He explained that his goal was to create an AI care partner to work alongside clinicians and manage the administrative load. This would empower individual providers to deliver the care they dedicated their lives to.
Dr. Kelly partnered with Waleed Mussa, a former colleague from a previous startup, and they founded Heidi Health in 2021. The company started launching its products in early 2024. In just eighteen months, the company has reportedly returned over eighteen million hours to frontline healthcare providers from more than seventy million patient visits across one hundred and sixteen countries.
The product is an AI medical scribe designed to handle the administrative work that burdens doctors. It can transcribe and dictate notes, generate personalized patient summaries, and track tasks, eliminating the need for sticky notes. Heidi Health developed its own AI model and also builds on top of other models, such as Gemini. This model agnostic approach allows the company to optimize for accuracy, latency, and cost.
The company recently announced a sixty-five million dollar Series B funding round led by Steve Cohen’s Point72 Private Investments. Along with the funding, Heidi announced a new AI tool: an agent that can call patients on behalf of a doctor. The former Chief Medical Officer at Microsoft, Dr. Simon Kos, and Plaid’s head of revenue, Paul Williamson, are also joining the company.
The company has raised ninety-six point six million dollars to date. Other participants in the funding round include Goodwater Capital, Headline, Blackbird VC, LG Technology Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. Dr. Kelly stated that the investors had seen all the other scribe products but had never encountered product adoption and usage metrics like Heidi’s. He said they appreciated the company’s obsession with the end user experience, noting that most competitors focus on top-down sales.
The new capital will support product development. Dr. Kelly hopes that providing doctors with better AI tools will expand clinical capabilities and remove the drudgery from their work. He noted that most medical conversations focus on developed countries, but he imagines a world where any healthcare provider can use Heidi to increase their clinical capacity. This could be in a war zone, a refugee camp, a region affected by climate change, or simply an underserved community. Heidi can help them reach more patients and deliver better health care results.
Artificial intelligence is transforming health tech. Other companies in the medical scribe space include DeepScribe, Ambiance Healthcare, and Abridge. Heidi says it works with more than two million clinicians each week, ranging from large hospitals to individual practices. The company offers a free version of its product with paid features, which Dr. Kelly believes is an effective way to attract new customers.
He stated that AI will understandably change everything in healthcare. However, at its core, humanity remains essential, particularly for maintaining and building trust. He said the true promise of AI is about doubling the world’s health care capacity, and that is what they aim to achieve.
This story was updated to clarify the investment came from Point72 Private Investments.