Augmedix nabs $17M to ‘rehumanize’ doctor/patient relations using Google Glass
and it may be coming to more hospital rooms Kshitiz Goliya / Reuters : Google Glass-based startup raises $17 million in funding Stephen Hall / 9to5Google : Glass isn't dead: Augmedix secures $17M as CrowdOptic streams its 10,000th livestream Mark Glover / Sacramento Bee : Sacramento's Sutter Health invests in SF firm using Google Glass Tweets: Dan Primack / @danprimack : Google Glass ain't dead yet http://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Augmedix's $17M round is the second act of a bet it made in January 2015, when it raised a $16M Series A for its Google Glass-powered health records product while the consumer version of Glass was being written off. By October of that year Google had stopped selling to consumers entirely and was quietly distributing a business-only version of Glass that clips onto other glasses — a pivot Augmedix's hospital workflow sits squarely inside.
The new money comes with a strategic twist: Sacramento's Sutter Health is an investor, meaning a large hospital system now holds equity in the very tool its physicians would use. Within six months of this raise, the company had grown past $36M raised and hundreds of US doctors on the platform, suggesting the funding did what it was meant to do.
First-order effects
- Augmedix gets capital to scale its remote-scribing service beyond early hospital deployments, with Sutter Health both a backer and a natural first customer for putting Glass into more exam rooms.
- Google gains a marquee proof point for its enterprise Glass pivot at exactly the moment the consumer product is dead — a health system paying to deploy the hardware validates the business-only distribution path.
Second-order effects
- Other hospital systems face a choice between building their own documentation workflows or adopting Augmedix-style services, pushing medical transcription vendors toward camera-and-streaming models rather than dictation.
- Sutter's equity stake sets a template for provider systems to invest directly in clinical-workflow startups rather than just buy their software, aligning procurement with cap table.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hardware dismissed as a consumer failure survives as vertical infrastructure — Glass's later Enterprise Edition 2 launch and the migration of its creator Babak Parviz to lead health efforts inside Amazon's Grand Challenge team both point the same direction: wearable computing's durable market is institutional, not retail.
The trend: Consumer-failed smart glasses are being rebuilt as enterprise tools, with healthcare providers acting as both anchor customers and investors in the startups that deploy them.