Cara’s owner said in a caption that she “can’t be annoyed at this face.”
Day: September 25, 2025
At the turn of the century, a suzani, the traditional embroidered textile from Central Asia, was almost impossible to find in the United States. These pieces, once given as dowries in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, were the kind of object you might stumble upon in the back room of a rug gallery or in the private collection of a well-traveled dealer. To collectors, they were mysterious and precious, valued partly for their rarity as much as their beauty.
Today, in New York and across the U.S., suzanis are everywhere. They hang in boutique hotel lobbies, appear in glossy interior design magazines, and are sold by the dozen on Etsy and Instagram. The journey from rarity to ubiquity is both cause for celebration and reason for reflection, and reveals how cultural objects travel, are reinterpreted, and can carry heritage into new contexts.
Rooted in family life and ritual, suzanis were traditionally embroidered by brides with circular and floral motifs, each stitch carrying symbolic meaning. They were displayed at weddings, passed down through generations, and treasured as heirlooms, remaining within Central Asian households for centuries before appearing on international auction blocks or design blogs.
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, suzanis began appearing in the U.S., arriving primarily through Istanbul’s antique textile markets. These textiles – once private heirlooms – caught the eye of auction houses in London and New York as rare examples of artistry. As design editors and boutique retailers rediscovered their vibrant motifs and handmade quality, suzanis shifted from decorative obscurity to sought-after global accents.
Collectors quickly prized their vivid palettes and dense embroidery, and museums displayed them as artifacts of a little-known artistic tradition. At auction houses, the most exceptional pieces commanded astonishing prices. For instance, a Shakhrisabz (Green City) suzani from eighteenth-century Uzbekistan was recently valued at up to £50,000 ($67,000) at Sotheby’s in London. As someone who once ran a family Persian rug gallery in the Midwest, I remember the excitement when a genuine suzani appeared. It was almost mythical, a piece that drew genuine excitement from serious buyers and curiosity from casual visitors.
In New York, designers showcase suzanis as bedspreads, wall hangings, and upholstery, while fashion houses borrow their patterns for prints. The mainstream embrace is a sign that a once-overlooked textile is now celebrated as part of the city’s design vocabulary, and that Central Asian culture is being appreciated in new ways.
Hand-embroidered suzanis take months of work, with their thread tension, symbolic motifs, and slight irregularities forming part of their beauty. Machine-made copies, now sold widely online, mimic the look but erase the artistry; selling for a fraction of the price, they may look authentic but have no connection to Central Asian makers or traditions. Yet the enduring appeal of hand-stitched suzanis shows that authenticity continues to matter, and that the artistry behind these textiles cannot be replaced by machines.
As suzanis find their way into new settings, they show that traditions remain vibrant as they adapt and endure. Their symbols of prosperity and continuity still resonate, whether in a family home in Samarkand or a loft in Brooklyn. To see a suzani draped on a bed or hanging on a wall is to encounter art in its most accessible form, something born of ritual yet still able to transform modern spaces. Their presence in the U.S. is not a dilution but a widening of recognition, proof that living traditions adapt without losing their spirit.
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- $5.3 billion Abridge became a healthcare AI darling with the help of medical records giant Epic.
- Now, Epic is releasing its own tech to compete with Abridge’s AI scribe.
- Abridge is the latest AI startup under pressure as its incumbent partner becomes its biggest threat.
The hottest AI startup in healthcare is at a crossroads: Medical scribe company Abridge’s closest partner and former shareholder, health records giant Epic Systems, just became its biggest threat.
In August, Epic said it plans to launch its own AI products to assist doctors with administrative tasks. One of those tools will automatically transcribe and summarize patient visits, the booming business behind $5.3 billion Abridge.
Abridge notched a landmark partnership with Epic in 2023. With Epic’s distribution, Abridge became one of the buzziest startups in healthcare, landing top hospital customers and raising hundreds of millions of dollars. The deal also gave Epic a single-digit percentage stake in Abridge, according to five people with knowledge of the deal. Two of those people said Epic sold its shares earlier this year.
Epic’s push into AI highlights a larger tension that’s playing out across tech, mirrored in relationships like Microsoft-OpenAI to Google-Anthropic: In the fast-moving AI race, what happens when dominant incumbents morph from partners and shareholders into competitors?
Abridge ran into a classic startup dilemma, building a business dependent on a giant’s ecosystem that then risks being undercut once the giant rolls out a competing product. It will now have to navigate a minefield as it clings to Epic to maintain key hospital revenue while attempting to cement its fortune beyond the health record company’s reach.
That reach is nothing to sniff at. Epic dominates electronic medical record software, selling its tech to about 42% of US hospitals and bringing in around $5.7 billion in revenue. Its closest health records competitor, Oracle’s Cerner, has about 23% of the market. So Abridge wasn’t surprised by Epic’s AI announcements, its investors told Business Insider — it always seemed inevitable that Epic would want its own slice of the healthcare AI pie.
But those investors said Epic couldn’t have anticipated Abridge would grow as quickly as it did.
The Epic partnership, which made it easier for Epic customers to use Abridge’s tech, was Abridge’s golden ticket. In the two years since that deal, the startup has raised over $700 million from top investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, reached a $5.3 billion valuation, and signed over 150 customers, including key Epic buyers like Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, and Johns Hopkins Medicine.
When adjusted for Abridge’s current $5.3 billion valuation, Epic’s single-digit stake in Abridge would now be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Epic and Abridge declined to comment on their relationship for this story.
Business Wire/AP
Abridge insiders agreed that the future of that collaboration could get messy with Epic’s AI strategy out in the open. Abridge insisted its software would remain integrated with Epic in a call with hospital customers at the end of August, according to STAT News.
“It’s hard to conclude, are they fighting or are they friends? They’re still talking to each other, but there are a lot of things that make you feel like, wait, what? What’s going on here? It’s a complicated picture,” one Abridge investor told BI.
Abridge faces plenty of venture-backed rivals, too, like Ambience Healthcare, which raised a $243 million Series C round in July. Epic’s plans have flipped that competition on its head.
Epic boasts unparalleled distribution. Like many incumbents, it sometimes lags behind on innovation. Abridge’s investors are hopeful that the startup’s tech has pulled so far ahead that Epic can’t catch up.
“They’ve got work to do. And they’ve probably got the money to go do it, as long as none of their new investors are super pissed off at them,” said Bryan Roberts, a partner at Venrock, which isn’t an investor in Abridge. “But they can’t milk the Epic cow for the next five years. When you have the valuation they’ve commanded recently, that’s what you should expect.”
How Abridge took off
Abridge spun out of a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, to combat clinician burnout. Two years later, CEO Dr. Shiv Rao launched Abridge’s flagship product to automatically transcribe and summarize doctor-patient conversations, cutting down on the dreaded “pajama time” clinicians spend finishing medical notes after hours.
Abridge also builds its own large language models, which power its suite of software for tasks like medical coding and real-time prior authorizations.
By the time of its watershed deal with Epic, Abridge had raised about $30 million and expanded several hospital pilots into full-blown contracts. The Epic integration proved to be the ultimate springboard. The partnership put Abridge in front of more Epic customers and allowed physicians to use Abridge’s tools inside Epic’s workflows, including its mobile app. Other applications might require doctors to exit their health records software to open a new window or even manually enter data.
Abridge
Abridge also secured venture funding from some of Epic’s customers. Two months after its deal with Epic became public, Abridge announced a fresh funding round that included Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Mayo Clinic, and UCI Health, all Epic customers. By August 2024, Kaiser Permanente had ditched a previous ambient scribing deal with AI startup Nabla and said it would roll out Abridge’s tech across its entire health system, encompassing about 25,000 clinicians across eight states.
Along the way, Abridge’s C-suite has carefully nurtured a rapport with Epic’s AI heads that is, by all accounts, perfectly convivial. The startup has spent countless hours at Epic’s campus in Verona, Wisconsin, codeveloping new features and trading tech tips, according to its investors. At Epic’s annual meeting in August, where Epic announced its coming AI features, Epic executives introduced the Abridge team to potential new customers, one Abridge investor said.
The startup never wanted to compete with Epic.
“I think some startups get up and they’re like, we’re going to be the new EHR. We didn’t have any interest in going down that path,” Abridge CTO Zachary Lipton said in a July podcast interview. “We need to partner really tightly with the other tech providers that constitute the health system’s backbone.”
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Epic’s competitive playbook
Epic has a storied history of welcoming new technologies to connect to its software and then, a few years later, moving to compete with them.
In 2020, it dropped its own telehealth feature, powered by Twilio, to compete with companies like Amwell and Teladoc that had integrated their video visit tools with Epic. The previous year, Epic rolled out a built-in messaging feature that overlapped with integrated third-party tools like TigerConnect. Epic hasn’t been afraid to take on bigger fish, either: In 2022, it unveiled a customer-relationship management tool pitched directly against Salesforce’s already-connected health cloud.
With AI, Epic is now running a similar play. A week after announcing its Abridge partnership in 2023, Epic deepened its ties with Microsoft, whose Nuance business has dominated AI transcription in hospitals. Now, Epic is working with Microsoft to build its competing ambient documentation tech, slated for limited release in early 2026.
Epic has been telegraphing its AI ambitions for years, with its investments in machine learning going back to the 2010s. Some of those bets have come with missteps. The company released an algorithm in 2017 to improve sepsis detection in hospitals; four years later, a JAMA Internal Medicine study found that the algorithm missed two-thirds of sepsis cases and frequently issued false alarms.
An Epic spokesperson noted that multiple other studies in the years since have demonstrated positive impacts, including significant sepsis mortality reductions, of Epic’s sepsis model in clinical settings. “We continually improve all of our products and as part of that, we recently released a second version of the sepsis model that works even better,” the spokesperson said.
Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Many of the timelines for Epic’s new AI releases aren’t clear, with various features expected from now until 2027. But even if Epic takes years to release those AI products, startups will likely face fallout from its announcement, said Carl Byers, a partner at F-Prime Capital and former CFO of Epic rival Athenahealth.
“IBM also had a habit of freezing out competitors just by putting out a press release and saying, ‘We’re going to build this feature next year,'” Byers said.
Like IBM, Epic might feel like the safe choice, especially for hospitals that have contracted with Epic for years, if not decades, Byers said. It may also be the cheaper choice for Epic customers if the company chooses to bundle new AI features with existing must-haves.
Byers puts it like this: “No one ever got fired for choosing IBM.”
Abridge’s balancing act
Abridge must now undertake a delicate dance: lock down its existing Epic customers while looking beyond them, pushing deeper into new product areas like revenue cycle management and broadening integrations with rival EHRs such as Oracle’s Cerner, Athenahealth, and Meditech.
Smaller healthcare AI startups that now find themselves in Epic’s shadow could be forced to consolidate, opening opportunities for Abridge to make acquisitions. Rao told Business Insider in August that the startup is considering buys to further accelerate its growth.
Epic, meanwhile, faces newfound antitrust pressures. The company is contending with two lawsuits, from Particle Health and CureIS, which include overlapping claims that Epic attempted to smother competition in the market.
Against that backdrop, Abridge’s investors maintain that the startup has every intention of continuing to work closely with Epic.
“You don’t know how this whole market is going to play out, so why not be a good partner to someone that’s been good to you? Why create an antagonistic relationship where there never was one?” one Abridge investor said. “You’re going to be working together forever anyway, at least in some form.”
Other VCs without financial ties to Abridge aren’t sold on that story.
“I’m sure they’re saying positive things about each other, and they both have good reasons — Abridge because they don’t want to spook their investors and customers, and Epic because they need to be seen as not crowding other companies out,” Roberts said. “But Epic wants every health system that uses Epic to use their AI scribe, not Abridge. That has to be true.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
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- Tech’s latest gold rush is using humans to train AI chatbots.
- Startups in the field are raising at soaring valuations and minting America’s youngest billionaires.
- Business Insider compiled a list of the key players, including Surge AI, Mercor, Micro1, and more.
Artificial intelligence was supposed to replace humans. Instead, it’s making them more valuable than ever.
Workers can earn up to $100 an hour as meme specialists training xAI’s chatbot Grok to decode internet culture or make similar rates teaching it everything from Japanese to finance.
xAI, Anthropic, Google, and other AI giants are hungrier than ever for these human AI trainers, who are typically gig workers that do things like rewrite chatbot responses.
Startups connecting these humans to AI labs are raising at soaring valuations and even minting some of America’s youngest billionaires. Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen, 37, is worth $18 billion, while Scale AI’s cofounders Alexandr Wang, 28, and Lucy Guo, 30, are worth $3.2 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively, according to Forbes. The three co-founders of Mercor, which is reportedly raising funds at an over $10 billion valuation, are all 22.
Ali Ansari, CEO of “human data” startup Micro1 — which announced it raised at a $500 million valuation earlier this month — predicts demand will grow 10 to 20 times in the coming years as fields like robotics boom. Ansari isn’t worried about these AI trainers automating themselves out of work anytime soon: human laws and expertise, he says, are always evolving.
Whether the boom proves sustainable or not, right now it’s bigger than ever. To make better sense of it, Business Insider compiled this list of the companies riding the wave, detailing their latest valuations, fundraises, and specialties.
Randy Risling/Toronto Star via Getty Images
Surge AI
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Breakthrough Prize
Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Turing
Invisible Technologies
Snorkel AI
Labelbox
Micro1
Appen
Thomson Reuters
Read the original article on Business Insider
BI/Momo Takahashi
- Wall Street is bracing for the impact of President Trump’s H-1B application fee.
- The $100,000 price tag could upend hiring for technologists and junior bankers.
- Experts broke down which finance jobs are most at risk and why.
President Donald Trump’s new H-1B visa policy may hit Big Tech the hardest, but Wall Street is well within the blast zone.
Big banks like JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citi have long used these work visas to hire a range of highly skilled overseas workers, from junior bankers to technologists and even risk managers and traders.
Trump’s late Friday executive order, which raised the application fee to $100,000 each, is expected to upend this hiring process in a way that could make it a lot harder for international students to get a leg up in finance — and potentially lead more financial firms to outsource their technology needs, experts said.
“If the $100,000 fee is indeed implemented, I would expect demand for H-1Bs would shrink to just the most highly compensated, hardest-to-fill roles,” said Ted Chiappari, head of Duane Morris’ immigration law group.
Chiappari pointed to junior-level bankers, like analysts, who he said are common recipients of financial industry H-1B visas. Computer-related jobs are also a big source of the finance industry’s H-1B hiring, making up about two-thirds of applications last year, according to a recent report from JPMorgan. The firm predicted the policy change could result in 5,500 fewer work authorizations being granted every month.
“If I were a hiring manager and the choice was between candidate A and candidate B, and let’s say I liked candidate A a little bit better but he had a $100,000 price tag on him — I’d have to like him a lot better,” said Meridith Dennes, founder of Prospect Rock Partners, a Wall Street recruiting firm.
A career-altering fee
For young people, the new visa fee could alter their entire career path. Breaking into finance — whether in hedge funds or investment banking — is a complex process that often begins in college, if not earlier.
If the new H-1B fee prompts some banks to avoid hiring international students to fill their entry-level ranks, US universities may see fewer students from other countries pursuing this track or attending at all.
“I think it’s going to make it that much less attractive to come to the United States,” Chiappari said.
Junior bankers earning roughly $185,000 or so, including bonuses, might not justify the $100,000 visa sponsorship expense.
“The question everyone is considering is, what’s the cut-off point? A million-dollar VP?” said an associate at a large private equity firm.
This person said that an associate earning under $400,000 might not warrant the added expense, but higher-level employees with bigger salaries and revenue-generating potential could.
Dennes said she would be “really freaked out” if she were an international student.
“One of the reasons why you study in the United States is to secure a job in the United States,” she said, adding, “Now nobody wants to hire you because you have a $100,000 price tag on your head.”
‘Offshore and outsource’
The visa application fee is expected to drive more hiring of American tech talent— but only to a point, Dennes said. Many US financial firms like Goldman Sachs have established software and tech hubs in countries like India, which could see more hiring to make up for workers who would have previously come to the US on H-1 B visas.
“If it gets too hard to do business in the US,” Chiappari said, “they’ll just offshore and outsource.”
Not all tech jobs will be so easily expendable. Some tech jobs can be expensive and hard to fill, which has led some financial firms to offer generous pay packages to compete with tech firms and the rest of the economy.
The industry’s higher salaries could play to its advantage in the H-1B lottery, said Bo Cooper, a partner at immigration-focused law firm Fragomen, who noted that certain industries, companies, or roles could be exempted from the $100,000 fee at the president’s discretion.
On Tuesday, the administration proposed a change to the H-1B lottery that “would give boosted chances in the lottery to those H-1B candidates who would receive the highest wages,” Cooper said.
While the real impact for Wall Street may not be entirely visible until bonus season rolls around, in some cases, it’s already happening. An executive at a small multistrategy hedge fund told Business Insider that his firm has decided against hiring a portfolio manager from a foreign country because of the fee.
The executive said firms with deep pockets are more likely to eat the added cost of the fee, saying, “This is a rounding error in their recruiting expenses.”
Read the original article on Business Insider