How Abridge Built A $5B AI Healthcare Unicorn | Shiv Rao, CEO - This Week in AI Ep 5

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This week, JCal sat down with Shiv Rao at LAUNCH Fest 2026. Shiv is a cardiologist, CEO, and co-founder of Abridge , a $5B+ company that's raised close to $1B to build vertical large language models for healthcare. Shiv breaks down why the US healthcare system is broken, how AI is already outperforming doctors on average, and what it took to build a unicorn in one of the most regulated industries on the planet. We explore how AI is transforming doctor-patient conversations, eliminating clinician burnout, and reshaping how care is delivered and paid for. Doctors Need 30 Hours a Day: An American Journal of General Internal Medicine study found physicians can't complete their daily workload in…