Notes to Do
There's a dinner scene Erez Druk tells often. He and his wife Gabi are at a restaurant with two doctor friends. The food arrives. The doctors open their laptops. The food goes cold. Gabi is a family medicine physician - and for the seven years Druk watched her practice, "I have notes to do" was the sentence that ended every evening. That dinner crystallized the problem. He started writing code.
That code became Freed. Launched in 2023, it's an AI scribe that listens to patient visits, transcribes them in real time, and delivers SOAP notes in roughly two minutes - a task that used to take fifteen. Today, over 25,000 clinicians across 96 specialties use it for more than 2 million patient visits every month. When Druk sat down to ask Gabi what she actually needed, her answer was surgical in its simplicity: "Do my notes for me." He wrote that down. It became Freed's founding directive.
"When a clinician tells me that Freed saved them from quitting medicine, or allowed them to have dinners with their kids again, I realize that our AI scribe is the proudest achievement of my life."- Erez Druk, Co-Founder & CEO, Freed
Druk grew up in Israel, learned the saxophone at age 10, and earned a scholarship from Berklee School of Music - before pivoting hard into computer science at the Technion, Israel's premier technical university, where he graduated at the top of his class. He moved to California to join Facebook, where he spent four years as a software engineer. On his very first day, he met Andrey Bannikov - who would eventually become his CTO at Freed.
But before Freed, there was UrbanLeap. Druk co-founded the government procurement platform in 2017, spending five years helping 35 municipalities streamline their purchasing processes and deploying over $16 million in public funds. In November 2022, he shut it down - not because the market was wrong, but because, as he wrote publicly, "we weren't good enough." The farewell letter named every single one of the 35+ team members by their contributions. That's the kind of founder Druk is: the kind who counts the people, not just the revenue.
The lesson he carried out of UrbanLeap's shutdown: never build for a user you don't know well and genuinely care about. That lesson had a direct implication. Gabi had been charting through dinners for years. He knew the user. He cared deeply about her. So he built Freed.
"Freed is not designed to make you more productive, make you more money, or help you become a better clinician. Its only purpose is to make clinicians happier."
The company's pitch to Sequoia was not a revenue optimization story. It was a happiness story. That unusual framing - happiness, not productivity, not billing efficiency, not administrative cost reduction - is what makes Freed different from the dozen other AI scribes competing for the same doctors. Druk describes the mission as "to be the most clinician-focused company in the world," and invites direct feedback by email when Freed falls short of that.
In March 2025, Freed closed a $30 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with Scale Venture Partners, Daniel Gross, Gokul Rajaram, and Ted Zagat joining the round. Total funding sits at $34 million. The product generates 70,000 notes every day. Freed has been named to CB Insights' 50 Most Promising Digital Health Startups for 2025. Survey data from the company shows 100% of clinicians reported improved work-life balance after adopting Freed, 80% felt happier at work, and 80% believed they delivered better patient care.
Druk's product philosophy shows up in the details. The learning layer - where Freed adapts to each clinician's specific note style, absorbing edits and preferences over time to become a personalized scribe - reflects his obsession with eliminating every redundant click. "Every time you edit or change a note," he says, "Freed becomes more like your person, like a human scribe would do." The company recently rolled out specialty-specific templates for psychiatry, emergency medicine, OB/GYN, and others, along with a Chrome extension that drops notes directly into EHR systems.
Away from the office, Druk makes yogurt. He has strong views against autonomous weapons development. He reads voraciously - "The Lean Startup," handed to him by a Polish colleague on his first day at Facebook, is the book he credits with making him obsessed with startups. "Running a startup is the hardest thing I've ever done," he says. "The most intense school I've been to." When he named the company Freed - a suggestion from a friend - it was the first time he and Gabi instantly agreed on something together. "Just named it after what it would do," he said. They liked the simplicity of that.
Asked about Freed's future, Druk says the company is "only 1% done." The vision is a comprehensive clinical assistant that anticipates needs, integrates seamlessly with any EHR, handles the full administrative layer of a practice, and lets doctors leave the office unburdened. The kind of assistant that turns "I have notes to do" into a sentence a clinician never has to say again.
