Knowtex

What is Knowtex and who sells it?

Knowtex is a San Francisco company founded by Caroline Zhang (CEO) and Jocelyn Kang (CTO), both Stanford AI scientists, in the Y Combinator Summer 2022 batch. Tracxn lists $500K from six investors, and press mentions backing from Jeff Dean without an amount.

The company now calls itself "The Frontier AI Lab for Healthcare" and describes clinical AI "powered by original models and in-house evaluation science."

Why does the VA contract matter?

A September 2026 press release names Knowtex a prime awardee on a VA ambient scribe contract with a shared ceiling of $775.72M. The company reports $15M in VA work from October 2025 and use at 79 VA medical centers. The ceiling is the total available to the contract, not Knowtex's revenue.

What does Knowtex do?

The homepage lists ambient documentation, AI coding and billing (ICD-10 and E&M), AI order entry, EHR summarization, chart question-and-answer, and drug and trial education. The company also offers forward-deployed engineers and R&D co-development to large customers.

Listed EHRs are Epic, Oracle Health, MEDITECH, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, Greenway, Veradigm, AdvancedMD, DrChrono, Practice Fusion and Kareo. Integration depth is not stated. Claimed compliance includes HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, ISO 27001 and FedRAMP, with a data processing agreement and sub-processor list but no linked audit reports. HITRUST and FDA status are not mentioned.

What does the evidence say?

Vendor figures: more than 200 specialties, more than 70,000 clinicians and 98% user retention. The company also publishes a benchmark called KnowBench.

A University of Rochester Medical Center orthopedics pilot, published by Knowtex, reports note time under one minute, accuracy rising from 75% to 90% and a 29% drop in after-hours charting. All of it comes from the vendor or a sponsored write-up.

A 2026 JCO Oncology Practice paper on AI scribes in medical oncology is about scribes in general and does not name Knowtex. A randomized trial of ambient scribes found that Epic Signal time metrics can overstate savings (PMC12768499), a reason to ask any vendor how its time savings were measured. No independent evaluation of Knowtex is verified, and the only praise on record is the VA selection and a CEO interview on the Techy Surgeon substack.

How much does Knowtex cost?

The pricing page shows "Request a Demo" and nothing else, and no trial or refund terms are published. For context, Commure's market overview of scribe vendors puts enterprise scribes at roughly $400 to $700 or more per clinician per month.

How do the scribe incumbents differ?

Abridge, Ambience, Suki, Nabla, DAX Copilot, Commure and Heidi all sell into the same buyers. Knowtex's own claims are the VA footprint and a broader product scope, with coding and orders in the same system.

The verdict

Knowtex has a large federal contract and a thin public record. A federal or VA-adjacent buyer has a clear reason to look at it, because the deployment at 79 medical centers is the strongest fact in the file. A private health system should hold it below the established scribes until it can show measured outcomes, audit reports behind the compliance list and a reference from a non-federal customer. A small practice has no way in.