Nabla Technologies, a startup helping medical professionals create clinical notes faster, today announced that it has closed a $24 million funding round.

The Series B investment was led by Cathay Innovation with participation from ZEBOX Ventures. It brings Boston-based Nabla’s total outside funding to more than $43 million.

Medical professionals spend up to several hours per week writing clinical notes, brief documents that describe a patient’s medical condition. They often also contain related information such as treatment plans. Nabla has developed an artificial intelligence platform, dubbed the Nabla Copilot, that can generate clinical notes automatically to save time for physicians.

The company says that its platform is powered by internally-developed large language models. Its model development team includes former engineers from Meta Platforms Inc.’s AI research group. The company counts Meta’s chief AI scientist, deep learning pioneer Yann LeCun, among its advisers.

Nabla’s Copilot platform generates clinical notes based on information that patients share during doctor’s visits. According to the company, setting up its platform before an appointment takes about 30 seconds. Copilot can be used during both in-person medical consultations and telehealth sessions.

The platform generates clinical notes in two steps. First, it creates a transcript that captures the remarks of both the patient and doctor who participated in a medical consultation. From there, Copilot distills the transcript into a clinical note that summarizes key details such as the patient’s medical condition, symptoms and treatment plan.

The platform also automates the task of loading clinical information into a healthcare organization’s EHR, or electronic health record, system. Nabla says Copilot doesn’t retain the transcripts and notes it generates. The platform is compatible with the U.S. healthcare sector’s HIPAA data protection regulation as well as the European Union’s GDPR privacy law.

Nabla claims that Copilot can save up to two hours of manual work per day for physicians, leaving them with more time to provide patient care. The company also promises to help medical professionals ensure that the data in their clinical notes is accurate. According to Nabla, only 5% of the AI-generated notes created using its platform require manual editing.

The company launched Copilot last March and has since built up an installed base of more than 20,000 physicians. Following the Series B funding round it announced today, Nabla plans to expand the platform with several new features including support for more languages. The company will also work to widen the adoption of Copilot among healthcare organizations in the U.S.

“Clinical documentation is only the beginning for Nabla,” said Nabla co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Alex Lebrun (pictured, right, with co-founders Laurent Landowski and Delphine Groll). “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.”

Nabla’s Copilot faces competition from several similar offerings including AWS HealthScribe, a cloud service that Amazon Web Services Inc. debuted last July. It uses Amazon Bedrock, another AWS service that provides managed generative AI models, to generate clinical notes. 

Pittsburgh-based startup Abridge AI Inc. also offers a platform that automates the creation of clinical documentation. In 2022, the company raised a $12.5 million funding round that included the participation of prominent AI researcher Yoshua Bengio. Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award with LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton for their work on deep learning models. 

Photo: Nabla