Abridge

Earned a PhD in computer science from Universität Karlsruhe (TH) and a Diplom in physics from LMU Munich before joining Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute, where he is Associate Research Professor working on speech recognition, multimedia processing, and conversation analysis. Prior to Abridge, co-founded Vercept, an AI startup that raised $16.5M with backing from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He currently also serves as a Research Scientist Manager at Meta AI in New York, leading a team working on multi-modal and voice AI. That academic and industry work in conversational AI directly informed the core speech-recognition and language-understanding technology that powers Abridge's clinical documentation platform.

Earned a master's degree in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University (2017), where research at the intersection of machine learning and human interaction foreshadowed his work in clinical AI. Prior to Abridge, he founded Hitloop, an AI/ML company, and started the KONAM Foundation, which applies technology to agriculture and education challenges. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 healthcare list in 2021. As co-founder and CTO of Abridge, he leads the machine learning organization behind the company's ambient clinical documentation and autonomous medical coding products.

A practicing cardiologist at UPMC's Heart and Vascular Institute, Rao earned his BA from Carnegie Mellon University and completed medical training at the University of Michigan. Before founding Abridge in 2018, he served as EVP at UPMC Enterprises, managing the provider-facing investment portfolio and co-funding a Machine Learning in Health program at CMU. He also co-architected Pittsburgh's "Energizing Health" initiative at the Kauffman Foundation's Health Data Consortium. Abridge was co-founded with CMU researchers Florian Metze and Sandeep Konam. Rao remains clinically active while running the company — an uncommon dual role that grounds the product in the daily realities of clinical documentation.

A Raj Reddy Associate Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the ACMI Lab (Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence), Lipton also previously worked as an AI researcher at Amazon before joining Abridge as its co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. His academic research focuses on building robust machine learning systems that can cope with changing real-world conditions — work that directly informs Abridge's approach to generating reliable clinical documentation from noisy, variable patient-clinician conversations. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC San Diego and an undergraduate degree from Columbia University. Unusually, Lipton maintains both his tenured professorship and his dual executive roles at Abridge, straddling academic research and product engineering.