Overview
Nikhil Buduma is chief executive officer of Ambience Healthcare, a San Francisco company founded in 2020 that builds an ambient AI platform for clinical documentation, medical coding, and clinical workflow automation. Buduma became CEO in a September 22, 2025 leadership transition announced on Ambience’s official blog, in which co-founder Mike Ng became president and chairman.
Ambience differentiates from scribe-only vendors by emphasizing coding-aware documentation, clinical documentation improvement, and clinical decision support extensions, with EHR integrations across Epic, Oracle Cerner, and athenahealth cited in its CEO announcement materials.
Role and company
As CEO, Buduma leads Ambience’s product and commercial strategy for an AI platform clinicians choose for documentation and coding per the company homepage. Ambience reports 80% average encounter-level utilization, 45% less charting time, and top rankings in competitive bake-offs on its site. The platform adapts to 200+ medical specialties including oncology, psychiatry, and emergency medicine.
Ambience lives inside Epic Toolbox using the Epic Ambient Module and native FHIR APIs per company product materials — a technical integration bar hospital CMIOs require before enterprise rollout.
Background and career context
Mike Ng and Nikhil Buduma co-founded Ambience in 2020 in San Francisco per the CEO announcement blog. Buduma is author of Fundamentals of Deep Learning (O’Reilly) per the same announcement. The September 2025 transition placed Buduma in day-to-day operating authority while Ng focuses on long-term strategy as president and chairman.
The CEO announcement states Ambience raised $343 million and partnered with more than 40 leading healthcare organizations — scale metrics enterprise committees weigh alongside KLAS Spotlight scores.
Company-building or leadership context
Buduma stepped into the CEO role after building Ambience’s technical and product foundation as co-founder. The company reports more than 200 employees in its official CEO announcement. Backers listed include Oak HC/FT, Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI Startup Fund, and Kleiner Perkins per the same post.
Ambience’s founding mission — freeing clinicians from EHR administrative burden — remains the public framing in its September 2025 announcement, even as product scope expanded into coding and CDI modules with verified E/M and ICD-10 accuracy statistics on its homepage.
Public milestones
September 22, 2025: Nikhil Buduma becomes CEO; Mike Ng becomes president and chairman per Ambience blog CEO announcement. 2026: Ambience recognized as KLAS CHIME Trailblazer Award winner per company blog. Company reports 97.7% KLAS Spotlight score in ambient AI category per CEO announcement materials.
Ambience homepage cites verified revenue impact — $13K in revenue per clinician per year at St. Luke’s per AAPC and KLAS validation — giving Buduma quantified ROI metrics for health-system CFO conversations.
Why their work matters
Ambience under Buduma tests whether ambient AI can own both clinical documentation quality and downstream revenue integrity — coding accuracy, HCC capture, and audit defensibility — rather than delegating financial outcomes to separate mid-cycle vendors. Specialty-aware models for 200+ domains address a recurring complaint that one-size-fits-all ambient scribes fail in complex oncology and psychiatry workflows.
For healthcare AI procurement, Buduma’s CEO transition clarifies operating leadership at a well-funded ambient platform competing directly with Abridge and other KLAS-ranked vendors.
Sources and references
Primary sourcing: Ambience Healthcare CEO announcement blog and homepage, reviewed July 10, 2026.
- Ambience — CEO announcement (ambiencehealthcare.com)
- Ambience — Homepage (ambiencehealthcare.com)
Funding, employee count, and KLAS metrics from September 22, 2025 CEO announcement only.