“We allow clinicians to focus on what they love, and what matters most—the patient.”
This year marks the first significant new manifestation of enterprise AI for healthcare. It’s the healthcare assistant and platform Suki whose assistive layer sits on top of all healthcare tech, fully integrated into all systems and services at doctors’ offices. Clinical. Documentary. Financial. Regulatory.
The new leap in healthcare AI arrives thanks to a potent booster shot from Zoom Ventures, the investment arm of the leading AI healthcare collaboration platform, Zoom Communications, Inc.
When Suki joined Zoom Ventures’ portfolio of AI investments – which includes Anthropic and CoreWeave Cloud – it was after a healthy 2024, during which Suki experienced a remarkable growth spurt, expanding fourfold in only 12 months.
The $70 million Series D raise announced in October 2024 contributed to $168 million raised to date. Suki’s Platform partnership with Zoom integrates AI-driven clinical notes into Zoom’s Workplace for Clinicians solution, designed to improve clinicians’ user experience and overall patient care.
The boost is intended for Suki to expand its health system and electronic health record (EHR) partnerships, including collaborations with Epic, Oracle Cerner, MEDITECH, and Athena. Suki’s full-service, AI-powered clinical documentation (notes) application and platform both work with all extant EHRs and other organizations to make healthcare tech as orders of magnitude more assistive, and previously burdensome administrative tasks such as keeping track of prescriptions far less burdensome for clinicians and patients alike.
Angel investor Punit Soni, founder and CEO, says, “Suki helps clinicians complete notes 72 percent faster on average, and assists with other tasks including coding and answering questions, and generates incremental revenue for organizations, delivering a nine-x ROI in year one.”
Curing a Common Ailment in the Healthcare System
The origins of Suki can be discovered in Soni’s initial intention to revolutionize an industry with cutting-edge tech. He had three conditions before 2017 when searching for his next investment: a space with “fixed ontologies, repeatable workflows, and sophisticated users. If you think about that for a second, healthcare lends itself super-well to it. Super-sophisticated doctors who keep doing the same thing, with minor clinical nuances.”
So, through “some combination of sheer luck and just looking carefully and being observant,” Soni started to uncover a major blue ocean opportunity in healthcare tech, realizing: “This stuff is going to be really good.” Not to say it didn’t require extensive development and field testing.
“I went to Harvard Medical School where my friend, an internal medicine doctor, was practicing. And then I spent time at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. I spent days on end just observing these clinicians. And it was pretty clear very quickly that [the doctors] were the most distracted people in the room” at many patient appointments.
Soni recalls an epiphany that came observing his friend during a medical visit with an Army veteran with comorbidities. “There was PTSD, there was diabetes. There was a social worker in the room, and a nurse in the room. So many people, right? And this guy, this super sophisticated professional is forced to write stickie notes and put them on the computer. Forced to type notes into the dock while trying to maintain some level of empathy with the patient.”
“When you take the arc of technology that’s actually possible, and you mix it with the arc of what’s actually impactful in society, you end up having something like Suki.”
“That was basically how I fell into it. I guess the only other point I’ll make is that if you want to ever figure out whether your ideas in healthcare are right and legitimate, you should go and hang out in break rooms with nurses because they will challenge your ideas and tell you exactly what’s actually happening…”
Today, the Suki suite is armed with full medical context plus best-in-practice ambient speech and AI capabilities, all of which aim to minimize the “epidemic of clinician burnout,” says Soni.
Interoperability a Must—And That Requires Invisibility
The Suki team has extensive experience building and commercializing modern healthcare, consumer, and enterprise products for companies like Apple, Google, and IBM’s Watson. A Wharton School graduate, Soni was priorly CPO of Flipkart, a $15B Indian e-commerce company. He held leadership positions at Google, including VP of Product at Motorola; Lead PM at Google+ Mobile and Google Mobile Apps; and PM at News, News Archive and Search.
But there are some critical special needs in a health care setting, where many decisions are sensitively dependent on technical details, such as specific doses of medicines. A mistake can mean life and death for the patient, a malpractice lawsuit for the practice. All those concerns for accuracy in a highly stressed 15-minute visit are closely reviewed by insurance companies for reluctant reimbursement.
The advent of AI tools such as EHRs in healthcare was supposed to ameliorate those concerns. Yet, anyone who’s experienced the past decade and a half of the EHR era of healthcare might argue that there’s even less time lately for doctor-patient interaction and even less accuracy. Not to mention all the redundancy.
Nowadays, it can seem to the average patient as though it’s only about the medical staff getting the records right. Some might even argue that it’s rare of late to find a doctor that actually faces the patient anymore.
Suki leadership and developers are well aware of that unintended consequence of AI in the exam room. Their vision of a tech overlay in healthcare differs significantly. Its aim is invisibility to the patient. And freeing up time and energy for the doctor to focus on interacting directly with the patient—not on the tech.
“The promise of our products,” Soni insists, “whether it’s the assistant that doctors use directly in a health system, or whether it is the platform that is baked into Zoom’s interfaces or other products, is that whoever uses it, nurses, doctors, MAs, and PAs—is that such clinicians should be able to maintain eye contact and spend time with the person who is the patient. And all of this tech happens in the back.”
Suki Assistant in Praxis
“The Suki Assistant app is effectively an AI assistant,” says Soni. “It can know that you’re going to be seeing this patient, and preemptively create a patient summary for the doctor. It can then contextually provide a Q/A so you can ask questions such as what is the patient’s A1C [long-term blood sugar] level over the last three months, or what prescriptions has the patient been taking?”
“The main job of the AI assistant is to take the ‘fumes’ of things that happen around a person, and contextually get things done for them. There are many skills of the Suki assistant. It can, for example, listen to a doctor and patient and automatically create a clinical note out of it. It can also, from that encounter, extract all the order information, and all the diagnosis information, and then attach, for example, ICD10 [insurance] codes to it so that people can get paid accordingly.”
Remember, invisibility is critical: “So,” says Soni, “your experience as a clinician walking into your office is you say, ‘OK, what’s my day like?’ And Suki has a list of all the people you have to see. ‘OK,’ you say, ‘I’m going to see Mary. Can you give me a summary of Mary?’ The system will take all the times that Mary’s ever come to see any doctor and summarize it in a couple of paragraphs so the doctor knows. It’ll give you the chief complaint. ‘OK, sounds good. Now pay attention, Suki.’ And then you talk to Mary and you both have a conversation …
“Then at the end of it, the clinician has a set of clinically accurate notes, broken down with subjective and objective assessments and plans with all of the nuances of prescriptions, orders, and diagnoses, all attached with codes attached to the product.”
“And then you say, ‘I’m done.’ And Suki writes all of it into the medical record system automatically. This is a very different experience from dictating. Yeah, you’re just practicing medicine—and everything else is taken care of.”