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Even generative AI critics and detractors should admit the expertise is nice for one thing: transcription.
If you happen to’ve joined a gathering on Zoom, Microsoft Groups, Google Meet or different video name platform of your alternative at any level within the final 12 months or so, you’ve seemingly seen an elevated variety of AI notetakers becoming a member of the convention name as effectively.
Certainly, not solely do these platforms all have AI transcription options inbuilt, however there are in fact different stand alone companies like Otter AI (utilized by VentureBeat together with the Google Workspace suite of Apps), and fashions similar to OpenAI’s new gpt-4o-transcribe and older open-source Whisper, aiOla, and lots of others with particular niches and roles.
One such startup is San Fransisco-based Freed AI, co-founded in 2022 by former Fb engineers Erez Druk and Andrey Bannikov, now its CEO and CTO, respectively. The concept was easy: give medical doctors and medical professionals a technique to routinely transcribe their conversations with sufferers, seize correct well being particular terminology, and extract insights and motion plans from the conversations with out the doctor having to elevate a finger.
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The concept labored effectively, because the medical scribe platform lately reached a brand new milestone: 20,000 paying clinician customers, Druk shared in a latest dialog with VentureBeat, every saving 2-3 hours saved day by day in handbook transcription or observe group duties.
With almost 3 million affected person visits monthly, Freed is quickly turning into a foundational device for documentation in small and mid-sized healthcare settings.
That point dividend has helped drive a excessive diploma of emotional resonance with prospects, who typically describe the product when it comes to restored work-life stability.
“Clinicians spend greater than 11 hours every week on documentation,” Druk famous. “We constructed Freed to scale back that burden by listening to the go to and writing the scientific observe.”
Rising competitors
However Freed’s success has attracted intensifying competitors. Simply right this moment, Doximity — the publicly traded doctor networking firm — launched a free ambient AI scribe obtainable to all verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, doctor assistants, and medical college students, as Axios and Stat Information reported.
The transfer highlights a shift towards commoditization within the AI scribe market, the place pricing is rising as a differentiator.
“We need to present free entry to instruments our prospects have requested for,” Doximity’s chief doctor expertise officer Amit Phull advised Axios, “and so they can work out on their very own whether or not the usual providing — or in the event that they’re paying for one thing else — stacks up.”
That launch follows different high-profile scribe funding rounds within the tens or a whole bunch of tens of millions. Whereas traders pitch visions of EHR-scale platforms, these ambitions nonetheless hinge on proving worth in billing, chart assessment, and compliance — not simply observe creation.
Nonetheless, Druk and the Freed workforce imagine they’ve an edge.
Turning burnout into alternative
Freed wasn’t born out of a technical brainstorm however from a private ache level. Druk credit the concept to his spouse’s struggles as a working towards household doctor, the place the fixed burden of note-taking turned a day by day supply of stress.
“For seven years, daily I heard at dwelling, ‘I’ve notes to do’ — greater than I heard ‘I like you’ from my spouse,” he mentioned. “That’s how burdensome documentation is.”
That lived expertise was a deliberate product imaginative and prescient: to take away the documentation burden from clinicians and provides them again management over their time and psychological power.
“The concept for Freed was: why is no one constructing one thing to assist clinicians?” Druk mentioned. “Everyone seems to be doing issues to them, not for them.”
Greater than transcription: a modular AI system constructed for drugs
Freed’s system does greater than document and transcribe conversations. The core product is a structured, specialty-aware AI documentation engine that generates scientific notes tailor-made to every person’s preferences.
Druk defined that Freed’s structure depends on a extremely modular pipeline. Whereas preliminary transcription is powered by a fine-tuned model of OpenAI’s open supply Whisper mannequin — optimized particularly for scientific vocabulary — that’s solely the start line.
The corporate’s platform layers on a whole bunch of focused AI duties to extract construction, filter out small speak, regulate terminology to medical requirements, and match user-specific templates.
“It’s not nearly transcription accuracy,” Druk mentioned. “It’s about constructing a system clinicians belief — one which will get smarter over time and adapts to their workflow.”
“Our engine learns from clinician edits,” he added. “Over time, Freed turns into your personal private scribe, not a generic one.”
Greater than 20 in-house clinicians repeatedly audit anonymized notes to enhance mannequin efficiency. And as clinicians make edits, the system continues to be taught.
Pricing and accessibility
Freed gives simple pricing:
- $90/month for particular person clinicians
- $84/month per person for groups of two–9 clinicians
- Customized pricing for 10+ seats
Every plan features a 7-day free trial, and the corporate gives 50% reductions to college students, residents, and trainees. Freed’s platform can be compliant with HIPAA, HITECH, and SOC 2 requirements. Audio recordings are encrypted and deleted by default, and clinicians retain full management over their notes always.
Quietly constructing a $20M ARR enterprise
Whereas Freed lately raised $30 million in Sequence A funding led by Sequoia Capital, its monetary momentum has come largely from its present buyer base.
In April 2025, Druk publicly shared on X that Freed has surpassed $20 million in annual recurring income.
That progress displays not simply sturdy product-market match but in addition a transparent go-to-market technique. Reasonably than chase enterprise contracts with massive hospital techniques, Freed has targeted on small clinics and solo practitioners — a phase typically missed by well being tech distributors.
“We’re targeted on the lengthy tail, supporting small clinics — the 40% of clinicians in non-public observe — to assist preserve them alive,” Druk mentioned. “These clinicians don’t have multimillion-dollar IT budgets, however they’re those who want our assist most.”
Freed is now used throughout greater than 1,000 small healthcare organizations, largely within the 1–50 clinician vary.
Druk mentioned he believes this focus is not only strategic, however mission-aligned — serving to preserve small practices viable amid {industry} consolidation.
Wanting forward: benchmarks and EHR Integration
Druk acknowledged a typical problem within the more and more crowded AI scribe/AI transcription market: it’s arduous to tell apart actual efficiency from well-marketed parity.
To deal with this, Freed is creating an inside benchmarking system to measure observe high quality and accuracy throughout 30 distinct standards — with the purpose of making an industry-wide framework for evaluating AI scribes.
“There are 100 AI scribes on the market. From the skin, they appear the identical,” Druk acknowledged. “We need to assist the market measure what really issues.”
In parallel, the product roadmap contains smarter EHR integration. Freed lately launched a Chrome extension to assist seamless observe transfers, and upcoming releases will embody extra automation round inputting notes into widespread EHR techniques.
Clinician suggestions highlights private impression
Past utilization metrics and product options, Freed’s impression is most clearly captured in person tales. Clinicians report reclaiming nights, weekends, and in some circumstances, complete careers.
Druk recalled a name with one doctor who advised him she had been making ready to close down her non-public observe after 10 years — till she tried Freed and adjusted her thoughts.
One other clinician mentioned, “I’ve been working towards for 44 years — why didn’t you construct this 30 years in the past? I can take pleasure in my observe once more.”
In a survey carried out with one enterprise buyer, 100% of clinicians reported improved work-life stability. Eighty p.c mentioned they have been happier of their jobs, and 80% believed they have been delivering higher affected person care.
“We take this cloud that’s hanging over clinicians’ heads — the stress of documentation — and we take away it,” Druk mentioned. “That’s what Freed is about.”
