$5.3B in 2 Years: What Abridge's Co-Founder and CTO Learned Deploying Enterprise AI at Warp Speed

$5.3B in 2 Years: What Abridge's CTO Learned Scaling Enterprise AI at Warp Speed With Zachary Lipton, Co-Founder and CTO @ Abridge In October 2023, Abridge was valued at $200 million. By June 2025, that number was $5.3 billion. The company went from a handful of pilot deployments to 150+ health systems, including Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and Johns Hopkins. This is not a "we found PMF and rode the wave" story. It's a masterclass in platform strategy, distribution, and knowing when to build custom vs. ship fast. In this session, Zachary will break down: The Epic integration that changed everything. How becoming the first "Pal" in Epic's integration program gave them access to 160K+ clinicians and turned a sales problem into a distribution problem Why embedding into someone else's workflow beat building their own front door, and how partnerships with Epic, Wolters Kluwer, and athenahealth compounded faster than direct sales ever could The team they built to pull it off. How a CMU professor recruited PhDs out of academia, paired them with a COO from Google/YouTube, and kept their CEO practicing medicine so the product never drifted from the user The moment they realized they had to stop being "an AI scribe" and start being a platform, expanding into prior authorization, coding, and revenue cycle The hardest strategic problem they face right now: competing with Epic, the same platform that made their scale possible What they'd do differently if they started over tomorrow, and what advice is dead wrong for founders selling into regulated enterprise buyers