What is Abridge?

40% of Abridge's model outputs are currently generated by in-house models, with a target of 60% the following month after distilling and fine-tuning an open source model.

“About 40% of our model outputs inside our product are generated by in-house models.”

Abridge is aggressively building in-house AI models by distilling and fine-tuning open source models to displace frontier model dependencies, a cost and control strategy worth watching in enterprise health AI.

“Next month it might be 60% because we've distilled a new open source model and fine-tuned it and gotten some feedback and, you know, we are convicted and we've just replaced a frontier model with this new in-house model.”

Abridge does not require FDA approval to sell AI tools to healthcare enterprises, countering a common assumption about regulatory barriers in health AI.

“Do you have to have an FDA process to be successful selling to enterprise with AI tools? No, you don't.”

Shiv Rao frames AI native companies across three historical vintages: post-Transformer paper pre-LLM, post-LLM pre-agent, and post-agent, each representing a distinct strategic starting point.

“There's like three variants of like AI native company, maybe. There's like we started 3 months after the Transformer paper. There's like in my head, there's like a post-Transformer paper pre-LLM company. There's post-LLM pre-agent company. There's post-agent company.”

Abridge has moved health system customers onto monthly release cycles, a notably fast cadence for an industry that historically ships quarterly or twice a year.

“We've gotten our customers onto monthly release cycles, which is pretty fast for health systems.”

Abridge positions itself as a non-competitor to Epic in the healthcare AI note-taking market, a notable strategic stance given Epic's dominance in the space.

“Yeah, it's we are not competing.”

Shiv Rao on Abridge's deliberate choice to forgo healthcare data revenue in service of trust.

“We don't make any money selling And we don't because trust is everything in health care.”