AI medical documentation company Abridge has been a breakout star of the AI healthcare category, doubling its valuation to $5.3 billion over the course of just four months in 2025. But a few years ago, it was stuck in slow-rolling sales conversations, struggling to get customers on-board.
“We had already been speaking to any number of health systems in 2021 and 2022, and in 2023 [following the launch of ChatGPT] they started to call us back,” said founder and CEO Shiv Rao. “But we needed to find a first health system customer who could be creative with us, who could basically try this out, be innovative and be experimental.”
They found that in the University of Kansas Health System, which became the company's first meaningful customer. But landing that deal wasn't easy.
The Abridge team had a bunch of Zoom meetings with the organization’s medical and technical leadership, but it all came down to what he described as their “first big shot on goal” — when he flew out to Kansas City to try to close the deal in person.
“It was a pretty significant kind of YOLO move for us in early 2023. We needed to land it because with large health systems, if you fail once, even once, that word travels so quickly,” he said, describing that he felt a lot of pressure to make it work because the industry is so risk-averse, and being seen as a failure with one major health system could prevent others from taking a chance on them.
Ultimately, they scored. Rao said he got the University of Kansas Health System to say "yes" by pushing the time-saving benefits of the product and taking as much risk out of it as possible, offering to build them a pilot proof of concept they could take a chance on. He described the moment as exhilarating. Abridge benefited from the partnership beyond the revenue, he said. The University of Kansas Health System helped them refine their offering and see it was going to work, and gave them the confidence to call up the next big health system a few months later.
“I think in the early stages, you've got to be a hope camel,” said Rao. “A drop of hope should get you through a desert.”
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Top photo: Shiv Rao. Credits: Abridge
