All Access

Health Tech Deals

Health Tech Deals Alerts

Alert

Standard

Health Tech Deals Thought Bubble

Thought Bubble

mustard

BFD Expert Voices - Health Tech Deals

BFD Expert Voices

Physician networking company Doximity (NYSE: DOCS) released a free AI scribe Thursday, highlighting the subsector's lack of technical moat.

Why it matters: The rollout sends a clear message to AI scribe businesses that transcription alone is no longer a survival strategy.

What they're saying: "We want to provide free access to tools our customers have asked for, and they can figure out on their own whether the standard offering — or if they're paying for something else — stacks up," Doximity chief physician experience officer Amit Phull tells Axios. 

Context: Despite a rapidly commoditizing AI scribe landscape, two scribing companies in June secured double-digit raises at sky-high valuations.

Abridge raised $300 million at a $5.3 billion valuation.

Commure raised $200 million after being last valued in 2023 at $6 billion.

The intrigue: Those companies' investors and CEOs have posited ambitions of becoming something akin to the next dominant electronic health record.

Yes, but: To get there, they'll need to demonstrate market uptake in areas including revenue cycle management, billing, chart review and compliance.

How it works: Similar to other Doximity products, including Dialer and GPT, the scribe is available for free to all verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and medical students, per Phull.

The HIPAA-compliant tool was trained for more than a year during a feedback process that engaged roughly 10,000 customers to create "millions" of clinical notes.

That process allowed the company "to get a good bit of specialty-specific feedback and lean into users' complaints about other tools in the broader marketplace," he says.

Inside the room: During the testing phase, clinicians across 13 specialties used the scribe — including several surgeons. Phull said that while they were at first "seemingly talking to themselves," they were actually "keeping track of the procedure."

One issue that arose while building was the scribe's inability to start and stop notes — a necessary function for doctors working in fluid environments like the emergency room, where they may be pulled away from a patient encounter, says Phull, an ER doc himself. 

The company was able to resolve such issues thanks to an iterative process with its test customers, he says.

Zoom out: Scribes are "going through a similar moment" as telemedicine did in the COVID era, Phull says.

"We're not coming to market with [the] scribe being this core element of our business and our longitudinal ability to exist as a company," Phull adds.

Follow the money: Doximity has a market cap of $11.4 billion.

In May earnings, the company reported Q4 2025 total revenues of $138.3 million, up 17% year over year, and adjusted EBITDA of $69.7 million.

Doximity "remains an outlier in the broader HCIT and tech-enabled services space in terms of its strong growth and profitability profile as well as its multiple," Leerink analysts wrote in a note following the report.

The bottom line: "The power of DOCS' operating model in our view is its customer stickiness and its ability to attract more members to its network, which should both drive increased demand and growth for its solutions," BTIG analyst David Larsen wrote in a May 2025 note.

Doximity releases free AI scribe, highlighting the sector's commoditization

Transcription alone is no longer a survival strategy.

Animated gif of a cursor with a caduceus wrapped around it

Physician networking company Doximity (NYSE: DOCS) released a free AI scribe Thursday, highlighting the subsector&#x27;s lack of technical moat.Why it matters: The rollout sends a clear message to AI scribe businesses that transcription alone is no longer a survival strategy.

topics

politics-policy

epstein-files

donald-trump

2026-midterm-elections

immigration

behind-the-curtain

race-and-equity

technology

privacy-tech-regulation

automation-and-ai

tiktok-news

big-tech

social-media

cybersecurity

economy

social-security

inflation

tariffs

federal-reserve

jobs

transportation

business

stock-market-news

retail-news

crypto

media

elon-musk

dealmaking

health

rfk-jr

drug-prices

axios-explains-abortion

public-health

world

israel

axios-explains-ukraine

iran

russia

china

energy-climate

nuclear-energy

climate-energy-policy

climate-change

extreme-weather

alternative-energy

electric-vehicles

science

emerging-tech

biomedicine

newsletters

charlotte

boulder

detroit

kansas-city

columbus

austin

dallas

atlanta

washington-dc

nw-arkansas

chicago

indianapolis

nashville

richmond

colorado-springs

houston

san-francisco

seattle

boston

des-moines

salt-lake-city

philadelphia

denver

phoenix

new-orleans

miami

twin-cities

raleigh

san-antonio

portland

san-diego

tampa-bay

cleveland

huntsville

pittsburgh

axios-local

axios-pro

axios-live

the-axios-show

Doximity releases free AI scribe, highlighting the sector's commoditization

What to read next