Ex-Facebook engineer is tackling clinician burnout at Freed after seeing wife’s challenges
Erez Druk, co-founder and CEO of Freed.
Courtesy: Freed
For Erez Druk, who spent almost four years working at Facebook, building health-care startup Freed has been a labor of love, quite literally.
Druk’s wife, Dr. Gabi Meckler, works at a community clinic in northern California, where she cares for children and adults, and delivers babies at a local hospital. When not with patients, Meckler is inundated with paperwork, constantly updating medical records and related documents.
“I got sucked into the world of clinicians,” Druk said in an interview. “One day, it was like, ‘Hey Gabi, what should we just build for you?’ And she said, ‘Do my notes for me.'”
Druk worked as a software engineer at Facebook from 2013 until launching his prior startup, UrbanLeap, in 2017. He shuttered UrbanLeap, which focused on software for public procurement, in 2022, and started Freed the following year, along with Andrey Bannikov, who had spent the prior decade at Facebook.
Freed offers an AI scribe that automates the clinical notetaking process in real time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company sells the technology directly to individual clinicians, oftentimes at small or independent practices, for $99 a month, and is beginning to partner with entire practices, Druk said.
On Wednesday, Freed announced a $30 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital, a hefty haul for a company raising its first institutional capital. The company also announced new features like custom note formatting, pre-charting, and specialty specific templates. Freed said it plans to build additional capabilities, like automating coding and other billing cycle functions.
Clinicians spend nearly nine hours a week on documentation, according to an October study from Google Cloud. A study last year from Athenahealth concluded that administrative tasks are a significant reason for burnout, as 64% of doctors feel overwhelmed by clerical requirements.
Physicians are responsible for completing mountains of paperwork, including the tedious and time-consuming process of clinical notes, which contain detailed records of patient visits.
Druk wants to automate as much of that process as possible so doctors can spend more time with patients and, perhaps, even with their family.
As of late February, 17,000 clinicians around the world are using Freed in about 2 million patient visits each month, he said.
“It just started spreading,” Druk said. “It’s really been beyond my wildest expectations.”
Crowded field
Druk isn’t the only one who sees the opportunity.
The AI scribing market has exploded in recent years as health systems have been searching for tools that can help address administrative burnout. Freed is going up against tech giants like Microsoft, as well as startups like Abridge and Suki that have developed similar tools.
Josephine Chen, a partner at Sequoia, said the crowded market reflects the seriousness of the problem. She said Freed’s scribing tool has gained traction by focusing on smaller, independent offices.
“Freed’s approach is unique because most of the companies we see are serving a different market segment,” Chen said.
Natalie Desseyn said Freed is the reason she’s still working as a nurse practitioner in psychiatry.
Desseyn sees about 250 patients through a practice called Cloud Break Therapy in Virginia. She’s been using Freed for about two years and pays for it herself. Without it, she said she wouldn’t be able to see patients on such a large scale, if at all.
“I’m not over here writing, so people feel really heard,” Desseyn said. “I can’t tell you all the ways, it’s literally changed my life.”
Desseyn has tried a few other AI scribing tools, but she said she always comes back to Freed. She said its model is better at keeping things precise, sticking to the facts and avoiding extraneous comments in the notes.
Meckler, Druk’s wife, said documentation was the thing she disliked the most while practicing medicine. She said Freed felt like “magic” the first time she used it.
Previously, Meckler said she would spend about half of her day writing notes. Individual tasks that used to take her around 15 minutes to complete now take closer to two, she said.
“I expect great things from Erez, but I was still shocked,” Meckler said.
Druk said he and his 50-person team are focused on building the business and its product portfolio this year. He said he remains committed to creating a platform that clinicians, and his wife, enjoy using.
“It’s truly the most fulfilling and the most important work I’ve ever done, and probably will ever do,” he said.
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Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
MongoDB shares sank 16% in extended trading on Wednesday after the database software maker issued disappointing guidance.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $1.28 adjusted vs. 66 cents expected
- Revenue: $548.4 million vs. $519.6 million expected
Revenue increased about 20% from a year ago in the quarter that ended on Jan. 31, according to a statement. The company generated $15.8 million in net income, or 19 cents per share, which factors in stock-based compensation. In the same quarter a year ago, MongoDB had registered a net loss of $55.5 million, or 77 cents per share.
MongoDB added 1,900 customers in the quarter, bringing the total to 54,500. But the company ended the quarter with about $360 million in deferred revenue, below the StreetAccount consensus of $370.4 million.
MongoDB is seeing slower growth than it had hoped for in new applications using its Atlas cloud-based database service, Srdjan Tanjga, MongoDB’s interim finance chief, said on a conference call with analysts. Meanwhile, MongoDB is hiring rapidly to pursue more deals with large companies, while pulling back on mid-sized businesses, Tanjga said.
During the quarter, MongoDB acquired artificial intelligence startup Voyage for an undisclosed sum.
“We want to capitalize on a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” CEO Dev Ittycheria said.
For the fiscal first quarter, MongoDB called for 63 cents to 67 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $524 million to $529 million in revenue. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had expected 62 cents of per-share earnings and revenue of $526.8 million.
MongoDB said it expects adjusted earnings per share of $2.44 to $2.62 and revenue of $2.24 billion to $2.28 billion for fiscal 2026. That implies 12.7% revenue growth, which would be the slowest rate at least since the company went public in 2017. Analysts were anticipating $3.34 per share of earnings and $2.32 billion in revenue.
Prior to Wednesday’s after-hours move, MongoDB shares were up 13%, while the S&P 500 was down about 1%.
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Alexis Ohanian
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”
Digg was founded in 2004 and rose to prominence as a major outlet for trending news because it allowed users to rate stories. Rose made what became an infamously goofy appearance on the cover of Businessweek in 2006 as the kid who “made $60 million in 18 months.”
The company said in a release that it aims to differentiate itself in the social media market by “focusing on AI innovations designed to enhance the user experience and build a human-centered alternative.” Digg said it will also create a platform that “prioritizes transparency, rewards human effort, and fosters enriching discussions.”
Ohanian also teased the collaboration, telling X followers on Wednesday that he was “working on something new… but also old… but also very new” and is “excited” to be partnering with Rose.
At its peak in 2008, Digg was reportedly valued at about $160 million. But the rise of Facebook and other social sites caused traffic to Digg to plummet. Meanwhile, Reddit, which was founded a year after Digg by Ohanian and current CEO Steve Huffman, emerged as a direct rival to Digg by forming communities around types of content and letting users similarly rate news stories.
In 2012, Digg’s brand and website were acquired by tech incubator Betaworks for about $500,000.
Reddit has continued its ascent, reporting nearly 102 million daily active users at the end of the fourth quarter. The site gained widespread attention when it became the center of the 2020 meme stock craze as retail traders inflicted huge pain on hedge funds shorting stocks using a subreddit known as Wallstreetbets.
Reddit went public on the New York Stock Exchange last March at $34 a share and has seen its stock nearly quintuple. Shares are up about 1% year to date and added 4% during Wednesday’s session.
Ohanian has moved on to other projects since he stepped down from Reddit’s board in 2020. He’s currently partnering with billionaire Frank McCourt in a bid for TikTok after President Donald Trump extended the initial deadline for the company’s Chinese-parent ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a ban.
Rose said in a post on X that he and Ohanian “dreamed up features that weren’t even possible with yesterday’s tech.”
“The new @digg brings some great nostalgia, but we’re not here to just rebuild the past or clone a competitor,” he wrote.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.
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