Heidi: The AI Doctor's Assistant Revolutionizing Healthcare

AI doctor assistant Heidi's value soars after $100m investment

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Six-year-old Melbourne start-up Heidi, which is the fastest growing company ever in the portfolio of the country's biggest venture capital firm Blackbird Ventures, has closed a $US65 million ($98 million) funding round that has sent its valuation soaring. It is the second funding round of 2025 for the firm that uses artificial intelligence to transcribe consultations between doctors and their patients. It will also kick off a secondary sale of $US5 million worth of existing shares this week, to clinicians among its customer base, giving staff and early investors a chance to make some money out of their on-paper gains.

Aussie AI startup that wants to double healthcare capacity outpacing Canva's growth

An Australian startup that is utilising artificial intelligence to help medical professionals is growing faster than Canva and has plans to double healthcare capacity. Melbourne-based startup Heidi has recently found its valuation jump by almost $100m after its second funding round of 2025. The company is the fastest-growing business in the portfolio of Blackbird Ventures, Australia's largest venture capital firm, and is now valued at more than $700m. Heidi advertises itself as an AI scribe that listens into consultations, takes notes and automates documentation for medical professionals. Its CEO and founder Dr Tom Kelly, who launched the company in 2021 while working as a vascular surgery trainee, said the main driver behind Heidi was reducing the large amounts of time medical professionals spend on administrative work. "We feel like we've solved something at a very deep level for healthcare and that's obviously showing up in the numbers," Dr Kelly said on Business Now. "There's so much impact to be had that the impetus is really how can we give doctors more time to spend with their patients. "I feel the urgency to do that because I want to double healthcare capacity. There's this huge opportunity to do it now." The company said its technology is used in two million patient sessions a week. It also claims to have been used in 73 million consultations over the past 18 months and across 116 countries in 110 languages. Dr Kelly said one of the main inspirations for starting Heidi was his own work in the medical space which led him to brainstorm ways to reduce the administrative workload with AI. "I'd always been a bit obsessed about how AI would change the way I was going to practice as a doctor," he said. "When I saw that problem, I started first building products that could speed myself up. "Once that started working, it was clear to me that, by the time I'd finished my training, someone would have built an AI care partner." Dr Kelly wanted to be the one to develop the AI that would "get rid" of the "tasks and the bureaucracy and the things that got in the way of me being a doctor". "So (I) decided to put my training on pause and be the one to build that technology," he said. The company has almost quadrupled in size over the past 12 months and is outpacing the early growth of Australian graphic design startup Canva. Dr Kelly said the AI boom in recent years meant it had become easier to develop the product as it works with tech giants such as Amazon or Google which are investing heavily in the emerging technology. "Where it used to be really difficult - we had to build a lot of this stuff ourselves - we now work with a lot different vendors, whether it's Google Cloud or AWS or others, to provide a lot of the infrastructure that lets us focus on all of the features ... that the clinicians who use Heidi really care most about," he said. "They don't really mind how it's built, they just want it to work and save them time." Heidi offers medical professionals a free tier with limited services alongside a paid option.