Medical AI startup Freed reaches 20K users saving 2-3 hours daily

Freed AI, a San Francisco-based medical transcription startup, has reached 20,000 paying clinician users who are each saving 2-3 hours daily on documentation tasks. The milestone comes as intensifying competition emerges in the AI medical scribe market, with Doximity, a publicly traded physician networking company, launching a free competing product and other well-funded rivals entering the space.

What you should know: Freed’s AI-powered medical scribe automatically transcribes doctor-patient conversations and generates clinical notes tailored to each physician’s workflow preferences.

• The platform processes nearly 3 million patient visits per month across more than 1,000 small healthcare organizations.
• Co-founded in 2022 by former Facebook engineers Erez Druk and Andrey Bannikov, the company recently raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital.
• Freed has surpassed $20 million in annual recurring revenue as of April 2025.

Rising competition: The AI medical scribe market is rapidly commoditizing as new players enter with aggressive pricing strategies.

• Doximity launched a free ambient AI scribe available to all verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and medical students.
• “We want to provide free access to tools our customers have asked for,” Doximity’s chief physician experience officer Amit Phull told Axios.
• Other competitors have secured funding rounds in the tens or hundreds of millions, though many still need to prove value beyond basic note creation.

How it works: Freed’s system goes beyond simple transcription by using a modular AI pipeline specifically designed for medical documentation.

• Initial transcription uses a fine-tuned version of OpenAI’s open-source Whisper model optimized for clinical vocabulary.
• The platform layers hundreds of targeted AI tasks to extract structure, filter out small talk, and match user-specific templates.
• More than 20 in-house clinicians regularly audit anonymized notes to improve model performance, and the system learns from clinician edits over time.

Pricing and accessibility: Freed offers straightforward subscription pricing designed for small practices rather than large hospital systems.

• Individual clinicians pay $90/month, while teams of 2-9 users pay $84/month per user.
• Custom pricing is available for organizations with 10+ seats, and 50% discounts are offered to students, residents, and trainees.
• The platform maintains HIPAA, HITECH, and SOC 2 compliance with encrypted audio recordings that are deleted by default.

Why this matters: The success addresses a critical pain point in healthcare where physicians spend more than 11 hours weekly on documentation tasks.

• “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.”
• Freed focuses on the “long tail” of healthcare—the 40% of clinicians in private practice who lack multimillion-dollar IT budgets but need documentation help most.

What they’re saying: User feedback highlights the profound personal impact of reducing documentation burden.

• “For seven years, every day I heard at home, ‘I have notes to do’ — more than I heard ‘I love you’ from my wife,” Druk said about his inspiration for starting the company.
• One physician told Druk 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.”

Looking ahead: Freed is developing benchmarking systems and enhanced EHR integration to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded market.

• The company is creating an internal benchmarking system to measure note quality across 30 distinct criteria, with goals of establishing industry-wide comparison standards.
• “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.”
• Upcoming releases will include more automation around inputting notes into common EHR systems beyond the recently launched Chrome extension.