How Abridge Built A $5B AI Healthcare Unicorn | Shiv Rao, CEO - This Week in AI Ep 5
About this episode
Shiv Rao discusses the impact of AI on the healthcare system and the journey of building Abridge into a $5B unicorn.
This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge , a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for. Doctors Need 30 Hours a Day: An American Journal of General Internal Medicine study found physicians can't complete their daily workload in 24 hours. Shiv explains where all that time goes anAbridge is clawing it back. AI Has Better Bedside Manner Than Your Doctor: Research from Harvard and other institutions now shows AI delivers more consistent answers and patients actually prefer it. Shiv explains why that's not as scary as it sounds. The Healthcare Stakeholder Problem: Shiv invokes Conway's Law to explain why every player in the system, doctors, insurers & hospitals are pointing guns at each other instead of aligning…
People in this episode
Host: Jason Calacanis
Guest: Shiv Rao
Topics covered
- AI in healthcare
- doctor-patient communication
- healthcare system challenges
- AI performance in medicine
- clinician burnout
- healthcare delivery
- patient experience
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Abridge, American Journal of General Internal Medicine, Harvard
Places: US
More episodes of This Week in AI
- Aravind Srinivas & Edwin Chen: The $1B Bootstrap, Apple's AI Edge, and Benchmarks | TWiAI E10
- The Future of AI: Personal Agents, Taste & Private Data | Lin Qiao & Demi Guo | E9
- What's Left for Humans When AI Builds Everything?
- How Focus Killed Sora and Saved Anthropic | This Week in AI with Victor Riparbelli, Nick Harris & Jeremy Fraenkel
- $2.5B Chip Heist, The Future of American AI, and Purpose-Built Robots | This Week in AI Ep 6
- Data Centers in Space, AI Excavators & Fixing AI Slop | Philip Johnston, Boris Sofman, Spiros Xanthos
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the This Week in AI podcast page.