The Rise of AI-Enabled Clinics: Akido Labs Bets on Owning the Entire Stack

On May 15 2025, Akido Labs announced a sixty million dollar Series B financing led by Oak HCFT, with participation from Y Combinator, Greco, SNR, Future Communities Capital, and Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean. The round will fund Akido’s plan to expand ScopeAI, an artificial intelligence assistant for clinical workflows, and to grow a physical network of AI-enabled clinics.

Akido is not trying to license its technology to hospitals. It is building and operating its own clinics, where ScopeAI is embedded directly into physician workflow, reimbursement processes, and care delivery. This is not a software company with a go-to-market problem. This is a care operator using its own software to control patient throughput and capture full-stack margin.

According to HIT Consultant, ScopeAI helps clinicians by transcribing visits, recommending follow-up questions, and drafting care plans. But rather than try to sell into health systems burdened with Epic and internal IT risk aversion, Akido integrates ScopeAI into public sector clinics it owns or operates through city and county partnerships. This includes long-term collaborations with the Los Angeles Department of Public Health and other regional agencies focused on Medicaid and uninsured populations.

This model diverges sharply from ambient voice startups like Abridge, Nabla, or Augmedix, which offer dictation tools to legacy systems and depend on clinician adoption inside third-party workflows. Akido sidesteps that problem entirely. It does not ask permission from CIOs or CMIOs. It deploys its product through its own workforce.

That vertical control has real implications for unit economics. ScopeAI is not priced per seat or per transcript. It is used to increase patient throughput, reduce documentation time, and improve coding precision. These effects are difficult to realize without full control of both staffing and billing. By running its own clinics, Akido can redesign scheduling templates, adjust panel sizes, and calibrate AI usage based on actual revenue per visit and downstream care plan adherence.

This operational leverage matters because investors are no longer rewarding software metrics alone. On May 16 2025, Doximity lost more than twenty percent of its market value after posting one hundred thirty eight million dollars in revenue but issuing weak guidance. Advertiser fatigue and margin skepticism are now reshaping what counts as durable growth in digital health.

Akido is betting that true leverage does not come from licensing software but from using it to generate more revenue per clinician hour. ScopeAI augments existing staff rather than replacing them, allowing one full-time physician to handle more patients with less burnout and fewer documentation gaps. If this improves care quality while enabling capitated contract economics, the business case moves from AI novelty to care model viability.

That strategy also comes with risk. Building and running clinics is expensive and operationally messy. Real estate, malpractice coverage, credentialing, staff turnover, and patient no-shows cannot be solved with code. However, the payoff is control. Akido does not have to wait for payer pilot contracts or health system procurement cycles. It moves at its own operating velocity.

This approach is not without precedent. Carbon Health pursued a similar hybrid model before pivoting away from direct-to-consumer urgent care toward enterprise contracts. Forward runs AI-enhanced primary care clinics but targets wealthy cash-pay markets. Akido, by contrast, is scaling in Medicaid-heavy regions through municipal partnerships. That makes ScopeAI not just a product, but a public health infrastructure layer.

The strategic takeaway is that the real barrier to AI in healthcare is not model performance. It is last-mile distribution. Akido is removing that friction by owning the mile.