Even generative AI critics and detractors must admit the know-how is nice for one thing: transcription.
In case you’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 doubtless observed an elevated variety of AI notetakers becoming a member of the convention name as nicely.
Certainly, not solely do these platforms all have AI transcription options in-built, however there are after all different stand alone providers 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 plenty 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 docs 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 carry a finger.
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The concept labored nicely, 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 every day in handbook transcription or be aware group duties.
With practically 3 million affected person visits per 30 days, Freed is quickly changing 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 usually describe the product when it comes to restored work-life steadiness.
“Clinicians spend more than 11 hours a week on documentation,” Druk famous. “We built Freed to reduce that burden by listening to the visit and writing the clinical note.”
Rising competitors
The transfer highlights a shift towards commoditization within the AI scribe market, the place pricing is rising as a differentiator.
“We want to provide free access to tools our customers have asked for,” Doximity’s chief doctor expertise officer Amit Phull advised Axios, “and they can figure out on their own whether the standard offering — or if they’re paying for something else — stacks up.”
That launch follows different high-profile scribe funding rounds within the tens or tons of of thousands and thousands. Whereas buyers pitch visions of EHR-scale platforms, these ambitions nonetheless hinge on proving worth in billing, chart overview, and compliance — not simply be aware creation.
Nonetheless, Druk and the Freed staff 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 thought to his spouse’s struggles as a practising household doctor, the place the fixed burden of note-taking grew to become a every day supply of stress.
“For seven years, every day I heard at home, ‘I have notes to do’ — more than I heard ‘I love you’ from my wife,” 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 vitality.
“The idea for Freed was: why is nobody building something to help clinicians?” Druk mentioned. “Everyone is doing things to them, not for them.”
Greater than transcription: a modular AI system constructed for medication
Freed’s system does greater than document and transcribe conversations. The core product is a structured, specialty-aware AI documentation engine that generates medical 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 medical vocabulary — that’s solely the start line.
The corporate’s platform layers on tons of of focused AI duties to extract construction, filter out small speak, modify terminology to medical requirements, and match user-specific templates.
“It’s not just about transcription accuracy,” Druk mentioned. “It’s about building a system clinicians trust — one that gets smarter over time and adapts to their workflow.”
“Our engine learns from clinician edits,” he added. “Over time, Freed becomes your own personal scribe, not a generic one.”
Greater than 20 in-house clinicians often audit anonymized notes to enhance mannequin efficiency. And as clinicians make edits, the system continues to be taught.
Pricing and accessibility
Freed provides 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 provides 50% reductions to college students, residents, and trainees. Freed’s platform can also 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 Collection A funding led by Sequoia Capital, its monetary momentum has come largely from its current buyer base.
In April 2025, Druk publicly shared on X that Freed has surpassed $20 million in annual recurring income.
That development displays not simply sturdy product-market match but additionally a transparent go-to-market technique. Fairly than chase enterprise contracts with massive hospital methods, Freed has centered on small clinics and solo practitioners — a phase usually neglected by well being tech distributors.
“We’re focused on the long tail, supporting small clinics — the 40% of clinicians in private practice — to help keep them alive,” Druk mentioned. “These clinicians don’t have multimillion-dollar IT budgets, but they’re the ones who need our help most.”
Freed is now used throughout greater than 1,000 small healthcare organizations, principally within the 1–50 clinician vary.
Druk mentioned he believes this focus is not only strategic, however mission-aligned — serving to hold small practices viable amid {industry} consolidation.
Trying forward: benchmarks and EHR Integration
Druk acknowledged a standard problem within the more and more crowded AI scribe/AI transcription market: it’s exhausting to differentiate actual efficiency from well-marketed parity.
To handle this, Freed is growing an inner benchmarking system to measure be aware 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 out there. From the outside, they look the same,” Druk acknowledged. “We want to help the market measure what actually matters.”
In parallel, the product roadmap contains smarter EHR integration. Freed lately launched a Chrome extension to assist seamless be aware transfers, and upcoming releases will embrace extra automation round inputting notes into widespread EHR methods.
Clinician suggestions highlights private affect
Past utilization metrics and product options, Freed’s affect is most clearly captured in person tales. Clinicians report reclaiming nights, weekends, and in some instances, total careers.
Druk recalled a name with one doctor who advised him she had been getting ready to close down her non-public apply after 10 years — till she tried Freed and altered her thoughts.
One other clinician mentioned, “I’ve been practicing for 44 years — why didn’t you build this 30 years ago? I can enjoy my practice again.”
In a survey performed with one enterprise buyer, 100% of clinicians reported improved work-life steadiness. Eighty p.c mentioned they had been happier of their jobs, and 80% believed they had been delivering higher affected person care.
“We take this cloud that’s hanging over clinicians’ heads — the stress of documentation — and we remove it,” Druk mentioned. “That’s what Freed is about.”
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