Paris-based healthcare technology startup Nabla has successfully raised $24 million in a Series B funding round, led by global venture capital firm Cathay Innovation, with participation from French investor Zebox Ventures. Nabla focuses on providing doctors with an AI-powered tool named Nabla Copilot, designed to streamline clinical note generation from patient consultations. This funding round brings the total investment in the company to $43 million.
Nabla Copilot functions as an AI assistant for doctors during clinical consultations, listening in and automatically drafting comprehensive notes that summarize key elements of the interaction. These notes cover a range of information, including patient medical history, symptoms, doctor diagnosis, and prescriptions. The technology boasts a high level of precision, with only 5% of generated notes requiring adjustments.
The primary benefit of Nabla Copilot is the time-saving it offers practitioners in documenting clinical encounters. The tool can potentially save doctors up to six hours per week by automating the note-writing process, allowing them to focus more on patient care.
The AI technology behind Nabla Copilot was developed by Alexandre Lebrun, a former engineer at Facebook AI Research, and is based on a large language model (LLM) approach, similar to the technology powering ChatGPT. The model generates human-like text based on the spoken content during consultations, utilizing separate speech-to-text technology.
Nabla, having raised €17 million in 2021 from investors including UK VC firstminute capital and French billionaire Xavier Niel, plans to leverage the recent funding to accelerate its expansion in the United States. The company is already making strides in the US market, having recently entered into a partnership with healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente to deploy Copilot to 10,000 physicians across Northern California.
Nabla’s ambition goes beyond clinical documentation, with Lebrun stating, “Clinical documentation is only the beginning for Nabla. Health systems are looking to leverage the AI opportunity to support their healthcare teams in many different aspects; we are getting ready to be there every step of the way.”
Since its launch in March 2023, Nabla Copilot has gained adoption by around 20,000 practitioners, with approximately 3 million consultations conducted in three different languages using the technology over the past year.
