Even the most vocal critics and skeptics of generative AI have to concede that the technology excels in one area: transcription.

If you’ve attended a meeting on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, or any other video call platform in the past year, you’ve probably noticed an increase in AI notetakers joining the call.

These platforms not only come with built-in AI transcription capabilities, but there are also standalone services such as Otter AI (used by VentureBeat alongside the Google Workspace suite of apps), as well as models like OpenAI’s new gpt-4o-transcribe and the older open-source Whisper, aiOla, and numerous others with specialized functions.

One such startup is San Francisco-based Freed AI, co-founded in 2023 by former Facebook engineers Erez Druk and Andrey Bannikov, now serving as CEO and CTO, respectively. Their concept was straightforward: provide doctors and medical professionals with a tool to automatically transcribe their conversations with patients, capturing precise health-related terminology and extracting insights and action plans from the discussions without the physician having to do any manual work.

The idea proved successful, as the medical scribe platform recently achieved a significant milestone: 20,000 paying clinician users, as Druk revealed in a recent conversation with VentureBeat. Each user saves 2-3 hours daily in manual transcription or note organization tasks.

With nearly 3 million patient visits monthly, Freed is quickly becoming a crucial tool for documentation in small to mid-sized healthcare settings.

This time-saving benefit has fostered a strong emotional connection with customers, who often describe the product as a means of restoring work-life balance.

“Clinicians spend over 11 hours a week on documentation,” Druk noted. “We developed Freed to alleviate that burden by listening to the visit and composing the clinical note.”

Rising competition

However, Freed’s success has drawn increasing competition. Just today, Doximity — the publicly traded physician networking company — launched a free ambient AI scribe available to all verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and medical students, as reported by Axios and Stat News.

This move underscores a trend toward commoditization in the AI scribe market, where pricing is becoming a key differentiator.

“We aim to provide free access to tools our customers have requested,” Doximity’s chief physician experience officer Amit Phull told Axios, “allowing them to determine whether the standard offering — or what they’re paying for elsewhere — meets their needs.”

This launch follows other high-profile scribe funding rounds in the tens or hundreds of millions. While investors pitch visions of EHR-scale platforms, these ambitions still rely on demonstrating value in billing, chart review, and compliance — not just note creation.

Nevertheless, Druk and the Freed team believe they hold an advantage.

Turning burnout into opportunity

Freed wasn’t born from a technical brainstorm but from a personal challenge. Druk credits the idea to his wife’s experiences as a practicing family physician, where the constant burden of note-taking was a daily stressor.

“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.”

This lived experience evolved into a clear product vision: to relieve clinicians of the documentation burden and restore their control over time and mental energy.

“The idea for Freed was: why isn’t anyone creating something to assist 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 goes beyond recording and transcribing 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 enhance 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.

This growth reflects not just strong product-market fit but also a clear go-to-market strategy. Rather than pursuing 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.”

*This article originally mistakenly labeled Freed’s founding date as 2022. We have updated and corrected the error and apologize for it.