Suki, the Redwood City, California-based health care AI company known for turning doctor-patient conversations into clinical notes, has raised a $90 million Series E round to push its technology into new territory: automating referrals, prior authorizations, order filling and follow-up scheduling. The round signals a broader industry shift as ambient AI vendors race to prove they can tackle administrative burdens that go well beyond documentation.
According to Axios, the round was led by Healthier Capital, with Crosslink Capital and Hercules Capital joining as new investors alongside existing backers. Healthcare Dive reports that Suki has now raised more than $250 million across five funding rounds. As part of the financing, Healthier Capital partner Aman Mahajan, M.D., Ph.D., will join Suki's board, Fierce Healthcare notes.
The company plans to use the new capital to build AI agents capable of filling orders and scheduling follow-ups, according to the same Healthcare Dive report. Suki also intends to deepen its partnerships with the more than 30 health technology companies that have already embedded its solutions into their own platforms, the outlet reports. Those embedded partnerships include Optum, Zoom and athenahealth, per Healthcare Dive's reporting.
From Scribe to Agent
Suki built its reputation on ambient listening and transcription that turns clinical conversations into structured notes, automated order entry, billing-code suggestions and patient summaries, according to Healthcare Dive. The company's platform integrates with Epic, Oracle Health, athenahealth and MEDITECH, Suki's own site states. Last year, Suki introduced a feature allowing its assistant to generate and stage prescription orders directly from ambient visits, a capability the company called an industry first at the time.
Becker's Hospital Review, describing that order-staging rollout, noted that clinicians retain control over the output: they can accept, edit or reject any generated prescription orders before the orders go to the EHR for review and sign-off. That human-in-the-loop design offers a window into how Suki may approach its newer, more ambitious agentic tools for referrals and prior authorizations, even as those capabilities remain in development rather than widespread use.
Why Prior Authorization Is the Target
The administrative weight Suki is aiming at is well documented. Prior authorization alone consumes an average of 13 hours of physician and staff time each week, according to the American Medical Association. That burden has made prior-authorization relief one of the most sought-after promises in health tech, and it helps explain why Suki, alongside rivals, is racing to move beyond note-taking.
Federal regulators have also been pushing on this front. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' interoperability and prior authorization final rule requires impacted payers to implement application programming interface requirements, though CMS has indicated that while certain provisions were originally required by January 1, 2026, payers have until primarily January 1, 2027, to meet the API requirements after considering stakeholder feedback, according to the agency.
Adoption Trends and Competitive Pressure
Ambient AI tools have been spreading quickly through U.S. hospitals. Among 2,784 U.S. hospitals using Epic, 62.6% had adopted ambient AI documentation tools as of June 2025, according to research published in AJMC. The same research found adoption climbing from 61.7% among hospitals in the lowest workload quartile to 73.1% in the highest, and found nonprofit hospitals adopting the tools at a much higher rate, 70.2%, than for-profit hospitals, at 28.8%.
Suki's growth figures reflect that momentum. Patient encounters supported by its tools grew more than 190% year over year in 2026, with revenue doubling in 2025 and on track for similar growth this year, Fierce Healthcare reports. But Suki is not operating in a vacuum. Axios notes that the company's push into agentic workflows comes amid stiff competition from incumbents like Epic and Oracle along with well-capitalized startups, a dynamic underscored by the fact that Ambience Healthcare raised $243 million and Abridge secured $300 million the previous year as they, too, expanded beyond clinical documentation, per Healthcare Dive.
Suki's customer-reach claims vary depending on the source. The company's own website states that more than 400 healthcare systems and partners choose its platform, while Fierce Healthcare separately reports that Suki works with more than 250 healthcare organizations and more than 30 technology partners that embed its AI. Neither report explains the differing categories behind those figures.
As detailed in Tech Times, the fresh funding arrives as the broader ambient-AI sector matures beyond its original pitch of simply saving physicians time on paperwork, moving instead toward tools that take on tasks traditionally handled by clinical staff after a visit ends.
