Suki, a Startup Selling ‘Siri for Doctors,’ Is Valued at $400 Million

(Bloomberg) -- Suki AI Inc., a health startup that makes a sort of Siri digital assistant for doctors, raised a new round of venture capital valuing the business at $400 million.

The five-year-old company plans to announce Tuesday that it received $55 million in a deal led by growth equity firm March Capital. It also formed an agreement with Google for its cloud division to start selling Suki’s services to health companies, said Punit Soni, the startup’s chief executive officer.

The upstart is also chasing a giant. In April, Microsoft said it plans to spend nearly $20 billion on Nuance Communications, a company that has provided note-taking services to doctors for over two decades. “We’re basically trying to catch up with companies that have been doing this for 20 years,” Soni said. 

Suki will spend its investment on improvements to its software for voice recognition and automated data-entry for physicians. The startup’s pitch is that it can relieve doctors of busy work without requiring health networks to overhaul IT systems, said Wes Nichols, the March Capital partner who led the financing round. Koninklijke Philips NV, a Dutch medical supplier, invested in Suki’s latest round and plans to integrate the company’s tech into Philips products.

The startup said it currently sells to 95 health care networks, and its products cost $200 a month on average. The privately held company declined to disclose its sales. “The revenue is meaningful enough,” Soni said.

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