Nabla is moving beyond AI note-taking, but Brian Manning inherits a much harder growth test

Nabla has separated commercial leadership from frontier artificial-intelligence development as it attempts to scale its clinical platform across increasingly complex healthcare organisations.

The privately held clinical artificial-intelligence company appointed Brian Manning as chief executive officer on July 21, 2026. Co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer Alex LeBrun will remain executive chair and chief artificial intelligence officer, overseeing model development, product vision and the company’s longer-term technology strategy. Manning joins after serving as president and chief revenue officer of Bamboo Health, where he helped scale the healthcare technology business beyond $140 million in annual recurring revenue and 300 employees. The leadership change comes as Nabla reports deployments across more than 190 healthcare organisations, use by approximately 100,000 clinicians and support for 40 million patient encounters annually.

The immediate strategic question is whether Manning can turn that adoption into durable enterprise growth while LeBrun divides his attention between Nabla and Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, the frontier artificial-intelligence research company associated with Yann LeCun.

Why is Nabla appointing Brian Manning after reaching 100,000 clinicians?

Nabla’s original leadership structure was built around product creation, artificial-intelligence research and early clinical adoption. Its next phase requires a different organisational capability: selling, deploying and supporting a regulated enterprise platform across health systems with thousands of users and complicated technology environments.

Manning’s appointment suggests that Nabla believes commercial execution has become sufficiently important to warrant a chief executive with a dedicated go-to-market background. He has more than two decades of experience developing technology companies at different stages of annual recurring revenue growth.

At Bamboo Health, Manning led sales, customer success, revenue operations and external affairs. Before that, he helped build PatientPing’s commercial organisation from an early stage through its acquisition. He also participated in the expansion of Zocdoc’s enterprise sales operation.

That experience is relevant because Nabla is no longer selling only an attractive productivity tool to individual clinicians. Its target customers include hospital systems, medical groups and electronic health record providers that conduct extensive evaluations covering information security, clinical governance, integration, procurement and return on investment.

Closing such customers can take longer than demonstrating an impressive product. Implementing the technology across thousands of clinicians may be harder still. Manning’s central task will be to create repeatable enterprise processes without losing the responsiveness that helped Nabla gain early adoption.

What does Alex LeBrun’s move reveal about Nabla’s changing leadership model?

LeBrun is not leaving Nabla. He will remain responsible for long-term artificial-intelligence strategy, model development and product vision while serving as executive chair. Co-founders Delphine Groll and Martin Raison will continue leading operations and technology, respectively, with Laurent Landowski remaining responsible for product strategy.

The arrangement gives Nabla a division of labour commonly seen when a founder-led technology company reaches a more commercially demanding stage. Manning can concentrate on customers, revenue, partnerships and organisational scale, while LeBrun focuses on technical differentiation.

However, the transition also formalises a reality that investors and customers should examine carefully. LeBrun also serves as chief executive officer of Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, the frontier research company founded with Yann LeCun. Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs has raised more than $1 billion and is developing world-model technology intended to move artificial intelligence beyond conventional language prediction.

Nabla has an exclusive partnership providing early access to research emerging from Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs. That relationship may become a substantial competitive advantage if the technology produces safer and more capable systems for complex healthcare workflows.

It also creates governance and attention-management questions. Nabla will need clear rules covering intellectual property, research priorities, personnel allocation, commercial rights and potential conflicts between the two organisations. Manning’s appointment establishes a full-time commercial chief executive at Nabla, but it does not eliminate the need for transparent boundaries.

Can Brian Manning convert Nabla’s rapid adoption into durable enterprise revenue?

Nabla said in June 2025 that its platform was used by approximately 85,000 clinicians across more than 130 healthcare organisations. By July 2026, the company reported more than 100,000 clinicians and 190 organisations.

That represents an increase of roughly 46% in the number of healthcare organisations and nearly 18% in the reported clinician base. The difference between those growth rates may indicate that Nabla has added smaller customers, entered initial deployments or broadened its electronic health record partnership channel. Nabla has not provided enough information to determine the exact customer mix.

The company has disclosed that its technology supports approximately 40 million patient encounters annually. That is an important measure of clinical activity, but it is not equivalent to paid seats, recognised revenue or recurring contract value.

Manning will need to improve the visibility of the commercial model. Investors and industry participants will want to know how pilots convert into systemwide deployments, whether clinician adoption persists after implementation and how revenue expands when customers add documentation, dictation, coding and workflow-automation capabilities.

Customer concentration also matters. Large healthcare systems can create substantial contracted revenue, but they may possess significant pricing power and impose expensive support requirements. A balanced customer base spanning national providers, academic medical centres, community organisations and electronic health record partners would reduce reliance on a small number of accounts.

Why is Nabla expanding beyond ambient documentation into contextual clinical intelligence?

Ambient documentation converts conversations between clinicians and patients into structured medical notes. It addresses a visible administrative burden and can be demonstrated relatively quickly, helping the category attract healthcare customers and venture capital.

The commercial challenge is that ambient documentation is becoming crowded. Independent companies compete with established healthcare technology providers, electronic health record vendors and large artificial-intelligence platforms. Basic note generation could become a feature within a broader software suite rather than a durable standalone category.

Nabla is responding by positioning itself as a contextual clinical-intelligence layer supporting work before, during and after an encounter. Its platform now combines ambient documentation, dictation, coding assistance and workflow automation. The longer-term strategy includes artificial-intelligence agents capable of performing multistep administrative and clinical tasks within existing systems.

Nabla Connect extends that strategy by allowing electronic health record vendors to embed Nabla’s ambient technology inside their own products. The approach can expand distribution without requiring Nabla to win every healthcare organisation through a direct sales process.

The trade-off is reduced control over the customer relationship. Embedded distribution can generate volume, but pricing, product visibility and account ownership may be influenced by the electronic health record partner. Manning will need to balance direct enterprise sales with channel partnerships that accelerate adoption without turning Nabla into an interchangeable infrastructure provider.

Does Nabla’s $120 million funding base provide enough capital for its next growth stage?

Nabla raised $70 million in Series C funding in June 2025, bringing its disclosed capital raised to $120 million. The round was led by HV Capital, with participation from Highland Europe, DST Global, Cathay Innovation and Build Collective.

The company said the funding would support product development, technical and clinical recruitment, go-to-market expansion and strategic partnerships. Nabla also reported at the time that live annual recurring revenue had increased fivefold within six months, although it did not disclose the starting value, ending value or current revenue.

That omission makes financial scale difficult to assess. A fivefold growth rate can be meaningful, but its significance depends on the underlying revenue base. Nabla has not disclosed profitability, current cash, gross margin, customer acquisition costs or the amount of additional capital it may require.

Clinical artificial-intelligence companies face substantial spending requirements. Nabla must finance engineering, medical review, customer implementation, information security, regulatory monitoring, enterprise sales and continuous model evaluation. Its product also depends on cloud infrastructure and third-party technology that can create variable operating costs.

Manning’s enterprise experience may improve sales efficiency and contract expansion. However, faster hiring and international growth could increase cash consumption before revenue catches up. The next financing round, if required, will provide a clearer private-market assessment of whether Nabla has converted adoption into defensible commercial value.

How much clinical evidence supports Nabla’s productivity proposition?

A randomized clinical trial published in December 2025 evaluated Nabla and Microsoft DAX across routine outpatient practice. The three-arm study included 238 physicians from 14 specialties and analysed more than 48,000 visits.

Nabla reported that physicians using its assistant experienced a 9.5% reduction in time spent working on notes compared with the control group. The Nabla group was the only intervention arm to produce a statistically significant improvement in the study’s primary documentation-efficiency outcome.

The results provide stronger evidence than customer testimonials alone. They suggest that the product can reduce a measurable component of administrative work under real clinical conditions.

However, the outcome should not be overstated. Reduced documentation time is not the same as improved patient outcomes, lower total healthcare costs or error-free medical records. Health systems must still evaluate note quality, clinician editing requirements, specialty-specific performance and the risk that generated documentation introduces inaccurate or unnecessary information.

Manning’s commercial organisation will need to sell evidence with appropriate precision. Healthcare customers are increasingly likely to demand measurable results during pilots, including adoption, time savings, note completion, coding performance, clinician satisfaction and financial impact.

Can the Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs partnership differentiate Nabla safely?

The partnership could give Nabla access to artificial-intelligence systems designed to understand how situations evolve and how actions produce consequences. In theory, such technology may support agents that can plan and execute complex workflows more reliably than systems built primarily around predicting text.

Healthcare presents an attractive but unforgiving application. An agent that prepares documentation or retrieves information carries one level of risk. A system that initiates orders, coordinates follow-up or influences clinical decisions creates much higher requirements for validation, human oversight and auditability.

Early access to Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs research should therefore be treated as strategic optionality rather than a finished competitive advantage. The commercial value will depend on whether the research can be converted into reliable products that integrate with fragmented healthcare systems.

Nabla must also preserve accountability. Customers need to understand which organisation developed the underlying technology, where data is processed, how models are evaluated and who is responsible when an automated action produces an incorrect result.

The company states that it does not train models on customer data, does not store audio by default and maintains compliance programmes covering the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the General Data Protection Regulation, SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Those controls establish an important foundation, but increasingly autonomous products will require continuing governance investment.

What workforce and organisational changes could follow Manning’s appointment?

A commercially focused chief executive typically brings changes extending beyond the executive office. Nabla may need larger teams across enterprise sales, customer success, implementation, clinical informatics, revenue operations, partnerships and international account management.

The company’s workforce also needs to retain a strong technical and clinical balance. Rapid commercial expansion can create tension when sales commitments move faster than product capacity. Healthcare customers frequently request customised workflows, integrations and governance controls that may not fit a standard software roadmap.

Manning will need to establish discipline around which customer requirements become reusable platform features and which remain bespoke implementation work. Excessive customisation can slow deployments and reduce margins. Insufficient flexibility can weaken the product’s value in specialised clinical settings.

The transition also tests whether Nabla can preserve a founder-led culture while professionalising commercial operations. LeBrun, Groll and Raison remain influential, meaning Manning will be working with an established founding team rather than replacing it.

That structure can be highly effective when responsibilities are explicit. It can become complicated if product, sales and research priorities are negotiated through overlapping authority. Employees and customers will look for evidence that Manning has genuine decision-making power over operations and commercial strategy.

Which milestones will determine whether Nabla’s leadership transition succeeds?

The first milestone will be continued conversion from limited deployments into organisation-wide adoption. Nabla should demonstrate that customers are expanding usage after pilots rather than treating ambient artificial intelligence as a temporary experiment.

The second will be commercial breadth. Growth across electronic health record partnerships, direct health-system contracts and additional clinical workflows would indicate that Nabla is building more than a single-product documentation business.

The third will be evidence that newer products generate measurable value. Coding assistance and workflow automation should improve revenue integrity or administrative efficiency without introducing unacceptable clinical or compliance risk.

Leadership clarity will provide another important signal. Manning, LeBrun and the existing founders must show that commercial, product and research responsibilities are aligned despite LeBrun’s continuing role at Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs.

Nabla has reached a scale at which another gifted technologist in the chief executive position may have been less useful than an experienced enterprise operator. Manning’s appointment therefore addresses a genuine organisational need. The outcome will depend on whether he can convert impressive usage figures into recurring revenue, disciplined deployment and durable customer relationships while Nabla attempts a technically ambitious move beyond automated note-taking.

Key takeaways on Nabla’s CEO appointment and clinical artificial-intelligence strategy

• Nabla appointed Brian Manning chief executive officer on July 21, 2026, as the company enters a more commercially demanding growth phase.
• Co-founder Alex LeBrun remains executive chair and chief artificial intelligence officer, overseeing long-term technology strategy and product vision.
• Manning previously helped scale Bamboo Health beyond $140 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 300 employees.
• Nabla reports that its platform supports more than 190 healthcare organisations, 100,000 clinicians and 40 million patient encounters annually.
• The company has expanded from ambient documentation into dictation, coding assistance and broader clinical workflow automation.
• Nabla raised $70 million in Series C funding in 2025, bringing its disclosed total funding to $120 million.
• The company has not disclosed current revenue, profitability, cash consumption or valuation, limiting assessment of its commercial efficiency.
• Nabla’s exclusive relationship with Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs could provide technical differentiation but also requires clear governance and accountability.
• The leadership transition will be judged through enterprise conversions, customer retention, product expansion and measurable financial outcomes.