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Even generative AI critics and detractors have to admit the technology is great for something: transcription.
If you’ve joined a meeting on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or other video call platform of your choice at any point in the last year or so, you’ve likely noticed an increased number of AI notetakers joining the conference call as well.
Indeed, not only do these platforms all have AI transcription features built in, but there are of course other stand alone services like Otter AI (used by VentureBeat along with the Google Workspace suite of Apps), and models such as OpenAI’s new gpt-4o-transcribe and older open-source Whisper, aiOla, and many others with specific niches and roles.
One such startup is San Fransisco-based Freed AI, co-founded in 2022 by former Facebook engineers Erez Druk and Andrey Bannikov, now its CEO and CTO, respectively. The idea was simple: give doctors and medical professionals a way to automatically transcribe their conversations with patients, capture accurate health specific terminology, and extract insights and action plans from the conversations without the physician having to lift a finger.
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The idea worked well, as the medical scribe platform recently reached a new milestone: 20,000 paying clinician users, Druk shared in a recent conversation with VentureBeat, each saving 2-3 hours saved daily in manual transcription or note organization tasks.
With nearly 3 million patient visits per month, Freed is rapidly becoming a foundational tool for documentation in small and mid-sized healthcare settings.
That time dividend has helped drive a high degree of emotional resonance with customers, who often describe the product in terms of restored work-life balance.
“Clinicians spend more than 11 hours a week on documentation,” Druk noted. “We built Freed to reduce that burden by listening to the visit and writing the clinical note.”
Rising competition
But Freed’s success has attracted intensifying competition. Just today, Doximity — the publicly traded physician networking company — released a free ambient AI scribe available to all verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and medical students, as Axios and Stat News reported.
The move highlights a shift toward commoditization in the AI scribe market, where pricing is emerging as a differentiator.
“We want to provide free access to tools our customers have asked for,” Doximity’s chief physician experience officer Amit Phull told 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 other high-profile scribe funding rounds in the tens or hundreds of millions. While investors pitch visions of EHR-scale platforms, those ambitions still hinge on proving value in billing, chart review, and compliance — not just note creation.
Still, Druk and the Freed team believe they have an edge.
Turning burnout into opportunity
Freed wasn’t born out of a technical brainstorm but from a personal pain point. Druk credits the idea to his wife’s struggles as a practicing family physician, where the constant burden of note-taking became a daily source 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 said. “That’s how burdensome documentation is.”
That lived experience turned into a deliberate product vision: to remove the documentation burden from clinicians and give them back control over their time and mental energy.
“The idea for Freed was: why is nobody building something to help clinicians?” Druk said. “Everyone is doing things to them, not for them.”
More than transcription: a modular AI system built for medicine
Freed’s system does more than record and transcribe conversations. The core product is a structured, specialty-aware AI documentation engine that generates clinical notes tailored to each user’s preferences.
Druk explained that Freed’s architecture relies on a highly modular pipeline. While initial transcription is powered by a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s open source Whisper model — optimized specifically for clinical vocabulary — that’s only the starting point.
The company’s platform layers on hundreds of targeted AI tasks to extract structure, filter out small talk, adjust terminology to medical standards, and match user-specific templates.
“It’s not just about transcription accuracy,” Druk said. “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.”
More than 20 in-house clinicians regularly audit anonymized notes to improve model performance. And as clinicians make edits, the system continues to learn.
Pricing and accessibility
Freed offers straightforward pricing:
- $90/month for individual clinicians
- $84/month per user for teams of 2–9 clinicians
- Custom pricing for 10+ seats
Each plan includes a 7-day free trial, and the company offers 50% discounts to students, residents, and trainees. Freed’s platform is also compliant with HIPAA, HITECH, and SOC 2 standards. Audio recordings are encrypted and deleted by default, and clinicians retain full control over their notes at all times.
Quietly building a $20M ARR business
While Freed recently raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital, its financial momentum has come largely from its existing customer base.
In April 2025, Druk publicly shared on X that Freed has surpassed $20 million in annual recurring revenue.
That growth reflects not just strong product-market fit but also a clear go-to-market strategy. Rather than chase enterprise contracts with large hospital systems, Freed has focused on small clinics and solo practitioners — a segment often overlooked by health tech vendors.
“We’re focused on the long tail, supporting small clinics — the 40% of clinicians in private practice — to help keep them alive,” Druk said. “These clinicians don’t have multimillion-dollar IT budgets, but they’re the ones who need our help most.”
Freed is now used across more than 1,000 small healthcare organizations, mostly in the 1–50 clinician range.
Druk said he believes this focus is not just strategic, but mission-aligned — helping keep small practices viable amid industry consolidation.
Looking ahead: benchmarks and EHR Integration
Druk acknowledged a common challenge in the increasingly crowded AI scribe/AI transcription market: it’s hard to distinguish real performance from well-marketed parity.
To address this, Freed is developing an internal benchmarking system to measure note quality and accuracy across 30 distinct criteria — with the goal of creating an industry-wide framework for comparing 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 includes smarter EHR integration. Freed recently launched a Chrome extension to support seamless note transfers, and upcoming releases will include more automation around inputting notes into common EHR systems.
Clinician feedback highlights personal impact
Beyond usage metrics and product features, Freed’s impact is most clearly captured in user stories. Clinicians report reclaiming nights, weekends, and in some cases, entire careers.
Druk recalled a call with one physician who told him she had been preparing to shut down her private practice after 10 years — until she tried Freed and changed her mind.
Another clinician said, “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 conducted with one enterprise customer, 100% of clinicians reported improved work-life balance. Eighty percent said they were happier in their jobs, and 80% believed they were delivering better patient care.
“We take this cloud that’s hanging over clinicians’ heads — the stress of documentation — and we remove it,” Druk said. “That’s what Freed is about.”
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