Heidi Raises $475 Million, Hits $1.26 Billion Valuation

Australian AI healthcare platform Heidi has raised $475 million in fresh capital at a $1.26 billion valuation, making it one of the country's largest venture raises this year and cementing its status as a newly minted unicorn.

The funding arrives in two parts. A core $140 million Series C round was led by existing investor Blackbird, with contributions from Phoenix Court, Point72 Private Investments, and Headline. Separately, General Catalyst, the American venture capital firm, committed $335 million through its Customer Value Fund — a vehicle that underwrites a company's sales and marketing spending rather than providing equity or debt, and takes a cut of the proceeds that spend generates.

Heidi has now raised $613.4 million in total. That figure includes two raises of $98 million and $26.5 million in 2025, and a $10 million Series A in 2023. The scaleup was last valued at $704 million following its October 2025 Series B.

Co-founded in 2021 by Dr Tom Kelly, Waleed Mussa, and Yu Liu, Heidi records medical appointments and produces structured documents for clinicians to review. The platform has supported 175 million patient visits and the equivalent of 67 million hours of clinical work across 190 countries.

From transcription to agentic AI

The new capital will fund expansion beyond Heidi's existing transcription and case management tools. Kelly, the company's CEO, described the next step as a "fully-fledged AI partner" — one that handles background work and frees clinicians for face-to-face care.

Heidi plans to build agents for "complicated, long-running jobs, things like preparing you for your day tomorrow, doing referrals, follow-ups, and actually giving Heidi agentic capability to do that," Kelly told SmartCompany.

The platform could review a patient's file for half an hour before an appointment and prepare a briefing for the clinician. Clinicians could even configure Heidi to contact patients ahead of their visit — an experience that, from a patient's perspective, "might feel magical and very AI-forward," he said.

A market thesis built on a staffing gap

Investors are underwriting a wager on the global shortage of medical professionals. The World Health Organisation estimates a shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030, and Heidi's backers position the Melbourne-born platform as a response to that gap.

Blackbird general partner Michael Tolo, whose fund first backed Heidi at its 2021 pre-seed stage, said in a statement: "our conviction is greater than ever."

"The healthcare deficit won't be solved with generic AI solutions that clinicians ignore," Tolo said.

Blackbird's confidence also rests on Heidi's technical approach. The company built its core transcription and note-taking technology in-house rather than relying on third-party AI platforms. That, according to Heidi, produces a targeted but cost-effective solution that can comply with local regulations on medical data privacy.

"Heidi invested early in deeply understanding what clinicians want, building its own models and training capability to deliver this," said Tolo. "This approach has earnt them the right to capture valuable downstream workflows in the most rigorous clinical settings globally."

No fully-AI clinics, yet

For all the agentic ambition, Kelly drew a firm line at autonomous medicine. A fully-AI clinic, where digital systems diagnose patients and lead on care decisions, remains some way off, he said.

"We love doing diagnosis, that's what doctors love to do," Kelly said. "If our customers ask us for these things, we'll of course look into it. But for the most part, it's usually gathering and summarising information for their judgment."

Some decisions will always require a human, Kelly added — citing the example of a vascular surgery department deciding whether to admit a patient for surgery based on whether they have a pulse.

"I can't speak for 50 years from now, when we have some robots, humanoids that can feel pulses and things like that, but actually doing real healthcare is really tricky, messy, complicated," he said.

"A lot of it is about managing risk. So what I think is that Heidi could help in documenting that patient that I see and I examine."

Heidi's expanded information-gathering capabilities will remain supervised, and "clinical judgment remains with the clinician," Kelly said. "But you're just extending the amount of work that a clinician can get done in a day."

With $475 million in the bank and a valuation that has nearly doubled in under a year, Heidi now has the runway to test whether agentic AI can meaningfully compress that global clinician shortfall — before the WHO's 2030 deadline arrives.