San Francisco-based Commure, which develops a suite of software programs designed to lend a hand healthcare organizations raise efficiency, recently announced it will acquire Augmedix, a maker of AI-powered clinical workflow and documentation tools.
The transaction is valued at $139 million and will see Augmedix go private and merge with Commure as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Since its founding in 2012, Augmedix has been working on groundbreaking approaches to automated medical transcription and clinical documentation. Its technologies support more than 20 major healthcare systems and hundreds of other care settings.
The acquisition will provide Augmedix shareholders with $2.35 per share in cash upon completion of the proposed transaction.
“As part of Commure, we believe Augmedix will be well-positioned to scale our ambient documentation solutions to even more clinicians and healthcare systems, while accelerating our efforts to introduce more innovative features, integrations and AI capabilities into our product suite,” Augmedix CEO Manny Krakaris said in a statement.
“Commure is strongly aligned with Augmedix’s mission and vision for the future. We believe the significant resources, deep industry knowledge and expanded technology capabilities we will gain through this transaction will strengthen our market position, enable us to capitalize on more opportunities and create a formidable, future-focused company.”
Augmedix started as a company specializing in developing clinical applications for Google Glass and soon raised major funding from VC firms such as McKesson Ventures and others.
Recently, the company has begun to focus more broadly on AI-powered tools to lend a hand reduce clinical documentation burden, undertaking projects with health systems like HCA on touchless charting and other initiatives.
But Augmedix’s share price fell earlier this year. Although it beat revenue growth estimates with a 40% raise in Q1, its shares fell 40% after the company reported a slowdown in supplier purchase commitments and lowered its full-year 2024 revenue forecast by about $8 million.
With the agreement with Commure, which becomes a private company, both companies hope they can focus on their complementary core technologies and focus on serving their provider customers by providing them with a better clinical experience.
“Together, we believe we can dramatically increase the productivity of every physician in America by leveraging language models that transcribe visits, autonomously encode them, and streamline back-office operations for billing teams,” said Commure CEO Tanay Tandon, who noted that the two companies are on track to enable more than 3 million physician visits this year through AI-powered ambient recording and revenue cycle automation.
“Commure Scribe and Augmedix Go save physicians an average of 2 hours of documentation per day, reducing documentation time by more than 80% and helping to generate billions of dollars in efficiency savings for providers nationwide,” he said. “We look forward to announcing much more in the coming months about how the company’s combined product suites will help transform provider operations across all of the systems we partner with.”