Heidi scaling new heights in Asia with bottom-up adoption

Heidi, the Australian-founded AI Care Partner, is scaling its Asia operations rapidly, built around a bottom-up adoption model that stands in contrast to the top-down, enterprise-sales approach favoured by most competitors in the space.

Rather like the company’s stellar rise in recent years, Heidi’s stand, all bright yellow branding and inviting, was hard to miss on a busy, noisy show floor at Smart Health Asia 2026 in Singapore. Speaking to HealthTechAsia there, Keppell Smith, Heidi’s newly appointed General Manager for Asia, outlined the company’s strategy for the region. Smith joined Heidi from Microsoft, where he led the technology giant’s Digital Natives business across Asia, and admitted the pace of growth since has taken some adjusting to.

“Unknown unknowns are the hardest,” he said, reflecting on his first months in the role. He had expected the company’s rapid growth over the past two years to bring significant challenges with it. The reality, he said, had proved more manageable than anticipated.

Solving for burnout

Much of that growth stems from an approach to market entry that differs from most of Heidi’s rivals. Rather than pursuing top-down enterprise deals with hospital leadership or government bodies from the outset, the company releases its product directly to clinicians and lets adoption build organically, with institutional buy-in following later.

The strategy has produced striking early numbers. Heidi’s Southeast Asia launch saw over 20,000 users within three months, Smith said, achieved without marketing spend or advertising. The same pattern has repeated itself elsewhere in the region: he pointed to unprompted interest from a Malaysian hospital group that turned out to already have dozens of staff using the platform informally, without being mandated by leadership.

Underpinning that adoption, Smith said, is a problem common to clinicians everywhere: burnout driven by administrative burden. He cited Heidi’s UK Impact Report, which measured across 15 million patient consultations and found the platform returned roughly four million hours in aggregate to the NHS workforce and £95,200 in annualised value of clinical capacity in a single SDEC pilot.

He also pointed to wider workforce data: research from the UK’s General Medical Council and British Medical Association suggests around 30 per cent of doctors are considering leaving the profession or practising abroad, citing poor work-life balance, burnout and better pay overseas. Smith attributed a significant part of that pressure to administrative burden specifically.

Smith said the same dynamic holds across Asia. “In Asia, the doctors have the same concerns, the same problems. They want to be with their families, they want to be deeper into the care,” he said, arguing that burnout is not a market-specific issue but a common thread across the clinicians Heidi works with in the region.

“I want my doctor to be like my airline pilot,” he said, arguing that reducing documentation load allows clinicians to focus on patient care rather than repetitive coding tasks required for reimbursement. Heidi appears to understand clinician needs better than most: a large number of its own global staff are registered clinicians, Smith said, and the company appoints senior clinical leadership in each country it operates in. 

This dual credibility, combining technical development with practising or clinically trained staff who can speak directly to how the platform works, has been central to building trust with clinicians on the ground, he said. He pointed to Dr Darran Foo, Heidi’s Chief Medical Information Officer for APAC, as an example of this approach in the region. Dr Foo had presented earlier that afternoon at Smart Health Asia.

Adapting to local needs

For Heidi, expansion across Asia is not simply a matter of scale. It is also about understanding a diverse and complex region’s local needs, each market is different and comes with its own opportunities and challenges.

Singapore, where Heidi established its regional headquarters for Southeast Asia in November 2025, was named as an early priority market, alongside Indonesia and Thailand. Smith pointed to Indonesia’s population of roughly 287 million and administrative burdens tied to clinical coding as a significant opportunity, while noting unprompted inbound interest from Thailand and the Philippines.

That breadth of opportunity has come with its own pressure. “The demand is outstripping our ability to deliver,” Smith said, describing the resulting need to prioritise which markets and healthcare organisations receive Heidi’s attention first, rather than pursue every opportunity at once.

Language has emerged as a key differentiator in navigating that complexity. Heidi currently supports more than 110 languages, the company says, including simultaneous deployment in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, which Smith described as setting Heidi apart from competitors that have focused primarily on Western markets. Gaps remain, however: he acknowledged Hokkien as an example of a local dialect not yet supported.

Trust through partnership

Government engagement is a required step before entering any market, Smith said, and Heidi does not launch in a country until relevant compliance and regulatory questions have been addressed. The company aligns with European data protection standards as a baseline across all markets, he said, and does not use patient data to train its models, storing data in anonymised form.

That regulatory groundwork has supported a fast-moving expansion. Heidi opened its Hong Kong office in November 2025 and its Dubai office, extending its regional footprint beyond its Singapore headquarters as part of a broader push into new markets across the Gulf and Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong office is paired with a research partnership with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to study the use of AI in clinical documentation, with a focus on efficiency, accuracy, and reducing administrative pressure on clinicians. The company says its platform has been used in nearly 56,000 consultations in Hong Kong to date, in a market it says faces a doctor-to-population ratio of 2.16 per 1,000 people.

Beyond regulation, Smith identified cultural attitudes toward cloud-based and AI-assisted systems as a bigger practical hurdle in parts of Asia, describing a degree of institutional risk-aversion, particularly around data hosted outside of on-premises infrastructure. This, he said, is a trust-building process rather than a technical obstacle.

During the interview, Smith pointed to a small device clipped to his uniform: Heidi Remote, the company’s first hardware product. Launched this year, the 21-gram wearable microphone clips onto a clinician’s uniform and captures consultation audio independently of a phone, laptop, or Wi-Fi connection, addressing what Heidi describes as a mismatch between the pace of clinical AI software and the physical infrastructure of most healthcare environments.

Hospital wards routinely record peak noise levels above 100 decibels, comparable to a construction site, the company says, while devices face constant handling, frequent disinfection, and shifts of up to 14 hours. Heidi argues that consumer hardware pressed into service for AI scribing was never built to withstand those conditions, and that variability in audio capture has become a limiting factor in transcription accuracy.

Heidi Remote supports offline capture with automatic syncing once connectivity resumes, and is built to NHS, HIPAA, GDPR and Australian Privacy Principles standards, alongside SOC2 and ISO27001 certification, the company says.

Heidi’s trek ahead

Smith said Heidi has grown from fewer than 50 staff to roughly 500 globally over the past two years. In Asia specifically, the company’s current headcount stands at around ten staff, which Smith said he expects to grow significantly by the end of the calendar year, to support a roadmap that includes expanding beyond clinical documentation into adjacent tasks such as patient follow-up communication and triage support, alongside continued investment in localisation.

That expansion is already under way at a global level. Alongside Heidi Remote, the company has launched Heidi Evidence, which surfaces peer-reviewed medical research at the point of care, and Dictate, a voice-to-text tool built for healthcare professionals.

Together, these products mark a shift in the company’s positioning from AI scribe to what it describes as an AI Care Partner spanning the administrative dimensions of clinical work. According to the company, its tools now process more than two million patient consultations each week across 190 countries, with its AI scribe having supported more than 143 million sessions since February 2024 and clinicians collectively saving in excess of 3.1 billion minutes of documentation time.

Asked about the platform’s longer-term direction, Smith said Heidi’s ambition remains centred on clinicians and clinical documentation for now, though he acknowledged that consumer health data and clinical systems are likely to converge over time.

That shift, he said, would ultimately depend more on regulatory and cultural change than on technology.

That focus on clinicians extends beyond human healthcare, too. Smith pointed to veterinary care as an unexpectedly strong area of early adoption for the company globally, attributing this to similar administrative pain points among vets, who face fewer regulatory constraints than clinicians treating human patients.

What comes through across the conversation is a company trying to apply a fairly consistent set of principles, listening to customers before assuming what they need, building relationships with regulators rather than working around them, and being honest about what it doesn’t yet know, across a region that resists one-size-fits-all approaches.

Whether that holds as Heidi scales further, particularly in markets where its own read of demand remains uncertain, is not yet clear. It is, by Smith’s own account, hard work. But if early adoption figures are any guide, there is plenty of room left to grow into.