Oct 10 (Reuters) - Suki, a startup that offers to build

artificial intelligence (AI) assistants in healthcare, has

raised $70 million in a Series D round, the company told

Reuters, as investors place bets on the adoption of generative

AI-powered applications in the sector.

The funding round was led by London-based tech investment

firm Hedosophia, with additional investments from Venrock and

March Capital. This brings Suki's total funding to $165 million.

Redwood City, California-based Suki did not disclose its

valuation, but a person familiar to the funding round said the

latest proceeds valued the company at about $500 million.

Founded in 2017 by former Google and Flipkart executive

Punit Soni, Suki develops AI voice assistant to reduce the

administrative workload for healthcare providers. Its primary

products Suki Assistant and Suki Platform have seen increased

adoption since the boom of OpenAI's ChatGPT, as healthcare

systems across the country explore how the technology can better

aid doctors' clinical work.

"When the AI trend kicked in, every health system wanted to

have an AI strategy," Soni said, adding that the company has

built proprietary tech stack by being in the space early.

The company capitalized on the demand, saying it now has

established partnerships with more than a dozen health systems.

Suki also touts the broadest integration of Electronic Health

Record systems (EHRs), working with Epic, Oracle-owned Cerner,

Athena, as well as MEDITECH.

Soni said the latest funding will be used to accelerate

product development, adding more features to the assistant and

build tools to manage the use of multiples AI models.

Suki competes with Microsoft ( MSFT )-owned Nuance, whose Dragon

Medical One is widely used for its speech recognition and

clinical documentation, as well as other startups such as

Abridge, which has raised $150 million from VC investors to

train medical AI models.