Melbourne medtech Heidi Health has made its first acquisition, buying UK clinical-AI company AutoMedica and using the deal to push well beyond the ambient “AI scribe” that made its name. Alongside the purchase, announced on 24 February 2026, Heidi launched two new products: Heidi Evidence, an ad-free clinical research tool, and Heidi Comms, an automated patient-communications assistant.
The moves reframe a company most doctors know as a note-taker. Heidi is repositioning as what it calls an “AI Care Partner” that spans documentation, point-of-care clinical reasoning and the administrative back-and-forth of running a practice. Financial terms of the AutoMedica deal were not disclosed.
According to Capital Brief, which first reported the deal, the acquisition gives Heidi something money alone is hard to buy: regulatory credibility in a major offshore market. AutoMedica was a case study in the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s AI Airlock, a sandbox that lets regulators and developers work through how AI medical tools should be assessed. Heidi inherits those learnings and AutoMedica’s relationships with UK national regulators.
From scribe to clinical reasoning
Heidi Evidence is the centrepiece. It is designed to close what the company describes as a knowledge gap at the point of care, surfacing sourced medical guidance while a clinician is mid-consultation rather than sending them off to search later.
On its company blog, Heidi says Evidence is built with a roster of clinical publishers and guideline bodies, including the BMJ Group, NICE, MIMS, Vidal, EMGuidance and HealthPathways, so the guidance reflects regional standards and drug formularies. Every insight comes with transparent citations and verbatim excerpts so clinicians can check the source. The tool is built in part on Anthropic’s Claude models.
Two design choices stand out. Evidence is ad-free by permanent commitment, meaning clinical suggestions are not shaped by advertising, and it is free for individual clinicians, with Heidi earning revenue from enterprise customers instead. “We believe that for AI to be a true care partner, the integrity of its evidence must be non-negotiable,” chief executive and co-founder Dr Thomas Kelly said in the launch materials.
The third piece, Heidi Comms, targets the coordination work that clogs clinics: bookings, reminders, follow-ups and patient phone calls. Together with Evidence, it widens Heidi’s surface area inside a practice from the consult room to the front desk. Industry outlet iTBrief Australia framed the trio as Heidi’s move from documentation into decision support and workflow.
A company scaling fast
Heidi is one of Australia’s fastest-scaling AI health companies. In October 2025 it raised a US$65 million Series B led by Steve Cohen’s Point72 Private Investments, a round TechCrunch reported took total funding to nearly US$100 million. Bloomberg put the post-round valuation at about US$465 million. Backers also include Australian venture firm Blackbird, Headline, Phoenix Court’s Latitude, Possible Ventures and Archangel.
The scale is unusual for a company founded in Melbourne only a few years ago. Heidi’s own figures put the platform at more than 100 million clinical interactions to date, roughly 2.4 million consultations a week across 110 languages, with reach spanning well over 100 countries. Those numbers are self-reported and have grown quickly; at the time of the Series B the company was citing more than two million consults a week across 116 countries.
The AutoMedica purchase is a notable change of gear. Australian software companies routinely sell abroad, but buying a regulator-tested UK firm to acquire market access and compliance know-how is a different play, closer to how mature medtechs expand. Trade publication Pulse+IT characterised the deal as Heidi shifting from an AI scribe into an AI Care Partner spanning documentation and clinical decision support.
Why it matters for Australia
Heidi is a rare example of an Australian AI company building genuine global scale in a regulated, high-stakes field rather than a consumer app. Its trajectory is a live test of whether local medtech can compete with well-funded US and European rivals on their own turf, and whether Melbourne can retain a category-defining health-AI company as it grows.
The regulatory dimension is the sharper local lesson. Clinical decision-support software sits under the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia, and moving from transcription into tools that surface treatment guidance raises the compliance bar. By absorbing a company that worked inside the UK’s AI Airlock, Heidi is effectively importing regulatory maturity, an approach Australian founders in health, legal and financial AI will be watching closely as they weigh how to enter regulated markets abroad.
There is also a sovereignty question worth naming. Heidi holds certifications spanning NHS requirements, HIPAA, GDPR and the Australian Privacy Principles, and processes sensitive clinical data at large volume. As the platform expands from note-taking into reasoning that can influence what a doctor does next, the standards applied to it, and the transparency of its evidence, become a public-interest matter, not just a product feature.
The ad-free, cited-source model is a deliberate answer to that concern. Whether regulators and clinicians accept it as sufficient, particularly as Heidi Evidence starts shaping decisions in Australian consulting rooms, is the question the next year will settle. For now, an Australian company has bought its way into European regulatory credibility rather than merely licensing software into it, and that in itself marks a shift in how the country’s AI sector is playing the global game.
Sources: Capital Brief, Heidi Health blog, Pulse+IT, iTBrief Australia, TechCrunch, Bloomberg.
