Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.
Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.
The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads.
The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care.
Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.
“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview.“What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”
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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.
“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”
Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report.
Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care.
To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were.
Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline.
“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said.
Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching.
The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.
“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.
People stand in front of an Apple store in Beijing, China, on April 9, 2025.
Tingshu Wang | Reuters
Apple iPhone sales in China rose in the second quarter of the year for the first time in two years, Counterpoint Research said, as the tech giant looks to turnaround its business in one of its most critical markets.
Sales of iPhones in China jumped 8% year-on-year in the three months to the end of June, according to Counterpoint Research. It’s the first time Apple has recorded growth in China since the second quarter of 2023.
Apple’s performance was boosted by promotions in May as Chinese e-commerce firms discounted Apple’s iPhone 16 models, its latest devices, Counterpoint said. The tech giant also increased trade-in prices for some iPhone.
“Apple’s adjustment of iPhone prices in May was well timed and well received, coming a week ahead of the 618 shopping festival,” Ethan Qi, associate director at Counterpoint said in a press release. The 618 shopping festival happens in China every June and e-commerce retailers offer heavy discounts.
Apple’s return to growth in China will be welcomed by investors who have seen the company’s stock fall around 15% this year as it faces a number of headwinds.
Since then, Huawei has aggressively launched devices in China and has even begun dipping its toe back into international markets. The Chinese tech giant has found success eating away at some of Apple’s market share in China.
Huawei’s sales rose 12% year-on-year in the second-quarter, according to Counterpoint. The firm was the biggest player in China by market share in the second quarter, followed by Vivo and then Apple in third place.
“Huawei is still riding high on core user loyalty as they replace their old phones for new Huawei releases,” Counterpoint Senior Analyst Ivan Lam said.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has bolstered its core search platform with artificial intelligence in the biggest overhaul of the product in 10 years.
Analysts told CNBC the move was a bid to keep ahead of fast-moving rivals like DeepSeek, rather than traditional search players.
“There has been some small pressure on the search business but the focus on AI and Ernie Bot is a key move ahead,” Dan Ives, global head of tech research at Wedbush Securities, told CNBC by email. Ernie Bot is Baidu’s AI chatbot.
“Baidu is not waiting around to watch the paint dry, full steam ahead on AI,” he added.
Baidu AI overhaul
Baidu is China’s biggest search engine, but — as is also being seen by Google — the search market is being disrupted.
Users are flocking instead to AI services such as ChatGPT or DeepSeek, which shocked the world this year with its advanced model it claimed was created at a fraction of the cost of rivals.
But Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, also noted that short video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou are also getting into AI search and piling pressure on Baidu.
To counter this, Baidu made some major changes to its core search product:
Users can now enter more than a thousand characters in the search box, versus 28 previously;
Questions can be asked in a more direct and conversational manner, mirroring how people now use chatbots;
Users can ask questions through voice but also prompt the seach engine with pictures and files;
Baidu has integrated its AI chatbot features, which enable users to generate photos, text and videos, into the product.
“This is more aligned with how people use ChatGPT and DeepSeek in terms of how they look for answers,” Wang said.
Outside of China, Google has also been looking to enhance its core search product with AI, highlighting how search has been under pressure from the burgeoning technology.
Baidu on the offense
Baidu was one of China’s first movers when it came to AI, releasing its first models and ChatGPT-style product Ernie Bot to the public in 2023. Since then, it has aggressively launched updated AI models.
However, the Beijing-headquartered company has also faced intense competition from fellow tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent, as well as upstarts such as DeepSeek.
These companies have also been launching new models and infusing AI into their products and Baidu’s stock has fallen behind as a result. Baidu shares have risen around 2.5% this year, versus a 30.5% surge for Alibaba and a 20% rise for Tencent.
“This is a defensive and offensive move … Baidu needs to be aggressive and perception-wise show they are not the little brother to Tencent on the AI front,” Wedbush Securities’ Ives added.
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
