Two Cape Town school friends and finance graduates, James Gordon and Robert van Biljon, have sold their AI medical scribe
Image: File
Two Cape Town school friends and finance graduates, James Gordon and Robert van Biljon, have sold their AI medical scribe, Nora, to Healthbridge, one of the country’s leading health technology companies.
Nora is a smart, AI-powered tool that converts doctor–patient conversations into structured clinical notes, helping clinicians save time on paperwork while improving the quality and consistency of patient records.
It was developed by Gordon and van Biljon after spotting the potential of GPT-4 in 2023, pivoting from finance careers to create a tool aimed at easing doctors’ administrative burden.
The deal comes after an "18-month incubation partnership in which Healthbridge held a minority shareholding".
Gordon said the inspiration for Nora came from a pressing problem in healthcare: doctors were overwhelmed by administrative work.
“We had a real-world problem to solve,” says Gordon. “Clinicians were drowning in administrative work. We built Nora to solve that, not just as a scribe tool, but as an intelligent documentation engine designed to work the way doctors do, integrating seamlessly into their existing workflow.”
According to Healthbridge, since its rollout eight months ago, Nora has grown its user base by 23% per month, retained 85% of paid users, and achieved a 32% compound monthly growth rate in clinical consultations processed.
"Nora is not a peripheral feature; it is a strategic AI pillar of the Healthbridge Clinical suite, said Luis da Silva, CEO of Healthbridge.
"Full ownership gives us the ability to accelerate its development and deepen its integration in ways that simply weren't possible before. We have already launched several AI-enabled tools independently, and the incorporation of Nora into the Healthbridge Clinical suite represents the deepening, not the beginning, of that capability,” da Silva said.
For van Biljon, "the outcome represents the kind of exit South Africa's startup community rarely sees".
"Finding a partner like Healthbridge, one that understood the technology,believed in the mission, and gave us the platform to prove it at scale, is exactly the kind of outcome every entrepreneur hopes for. This acquisition is not the end of Nora. It is the beginning of what Nora can become".
IOL BUSINESS
mthobisi.nozulela@iol.co.za