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Augmedix Inc
NASDAQ:AUGX

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Augmedix Inc
NASDAQ:AUGX
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Price: 2.79 USD -2.11% Market Closed
Updated: Apr 26, 2024

Earnings Call Analysis

Q4-2023 Analysis
Augmedix Inc

Company's Revenue and Margin Guidance for 2024

In the fourth quarter of 2023, the company reported a revenue of $12.7 million, a 54% year-on-year gross profit growth, and reduced operating losses by over $1.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss improved by $1.2 million year-on-year. For 2024, revenue is projected to be between $60 and $62 million, with about $13.4 million expected in the first quarter. However, the first quarter GAAP gross margins are anticipated to decline by approximately 300 basis points.

Strategic Growth Investments

Augmedix is channeling efforts into strategic hires and expanding its engineering team, anticipating a fruitful return on these investments later in the current year and more significantly in 2025. This expansion is part of an aggressive approach to capturing a larger share of the generative AI market space, a strategy that was outlined during the recent capital raise.

Financial Highlights and Performance

For the fourth quarter of 2023, Augmedix reported a revenue of $12.7 million, which slightly surpassed their preliminary expectations. The growing adoption of their services by existing customers fueled this incremental growth. The company saw a 300 basis point improvement in gross margin year-on-year, from 46.3% to 49.3%, which the company attributes to both increased scale and efficiency and the strategic relocation of clinician services. This translated to a 54% gross profit growth. A noteworthy achievement was the reduction of operating losses by over $1.1 million compared to the previous year, coupled with a significant improvement in adjusted EBITDA margin, which improved from negative 51% to negative 26%.

Customer Retention and Profit Growth

The company also reported a robust 148% dollar-based net revenue retention for their Health Enterprise customers, marking a solid increase from 128% in 2022. Gross profit has surged by 54%, leading to a margin increase to 48.0% from the prior 45.1%. This financial vigor is supported by improved operational efficiency and a healthy cash position of $46.2 million as of December 31, 2023, bolstered from $21.3 million the previous year.

Forward-looking Guidance

Looking ahead, Augmedix has set a revenue target of $60 million to $62 million for 2024, riding on the positive momentum from its solid performance in 2023. The first quarter of 2024 is expected to bring in approximately $13.4 million in revenue, although GAAP gross margins may see a temporary dip due to one-off expenses related to strategic initiatives in Bangladesh and India. Gross margins are, however, projected to rebound in May. To fuel future growth, the company plans to deploy approximately $9 million more than previously planned in 2024, primarily in sales and marketing, as well as engineering, with the culmination of operating expenses reaching the mid to upper $50 million range for the year.

Market Positioning and Product Deployment

Augmedix continues to focus on its mission to alleviate the administrative workload of clinicians and improve health care operations efficiency. They have cultivated a diverse product portfolio and crafted Augmedix as a potent data delivery platform, a strategy that promises sustained growth. Company executives express strong confidence in this trajectory. One of the key highlights in product deployment is their work with HCA Healthcare, where they are rolling out services across multiple hospitals and planning to expand beyond emergency departments, indicative of both client satisfaction and operational success.

Earnings Call Transcript

Earnings Call Transcript
2023-Q4

from 0
Operator

Greetings, and welcome to Augmedix Fourth Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions]. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce Matt Chesler, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

M
Matt Chesler

Thank you, operator. Joining me today are Manny Krakaris, Chief Executive Officer of Augmedix; and Paul Ginocchio, Chief Financial Officer. This afternoon, we released financial results for the quarter ended December 31, 2023. We've posted a copy of the press release and an investor presentation on our website at augmedix.com. We'll begin our call with prepared remarks to be followed by a Q&A session. This call is also being simulcast and will be archived on our website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws which are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements that relate to expectations or predictions of future events, results or performance are forward-looking statements. They are based upon our current estimates and various assumptions and involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated or implied. Accordingly, you should not place undue line on these statements. For a list and description of the risks and uncertainties associated with our business, please refer to Risk Factors and Management's Discussion and Analysis in our most recent Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and similar disclosures and subsequent reports filed with the SEC. Also during our call today, we'll discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which adjust our GAAP results to eliminate the impact of certain items. You will find additional information regarding these financial measures and a reconciliation to GAAP measures in today's press release. This call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast today, March 18, 2024. We disclaim any intention or obligation, except as required by law, to update or revise financial projections or forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events or otherwise. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Manny.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Thanks, Matt. This was a solid ending to a strong and strategically important year for Augmedix. We met or exceeded all of our financial targets while assembling the broadest portfolio of ambient class solutions in the industry including a fully automated AI documentation solution where we serve more care settings than any other player in our business. We are leveraging the structured data we produce and our bidirectional communication channel to the point of care to become even more valuable to our health care enterprise customers. And of course, we have onboarded an enviable set of customers and partners that are supporting us along the way and to provide high visibility to incremental growth. We are well positioned to win. The key to success, we believe, is to be able to meet customers where they are today, in other words, solve their current problems today and where they want to be in 2 to 3 years. It is for this reason that we are offering varying levels of service embedded within our product suite. Customers can choose products ranging from a fully autonomous software product we call Augmedix Go, with no human assistance on our part to a full-service solution, which we call Augmedix Live, where we assign a highly trained medical documentation specialist to observe patient encounters remotely and deliver a very high-quality note and ancillary services to the clinician. Importantly, we also deliver clinical decision support to the point of care and structured data that positively impacts customers' downstream activities. Finally, we are one of only 2 documentation vendors to be certified by the High Trust Alliance for information security. This prestigious certification validates our commitment to safeguard sensitive patient information, which we know is currently at the top of many customers' minds. This broad product approach drove our growth in 2023 and it is resonating with the market today. As evidence of this, last week, we were selected to participate in a large pilot with a Fortune 100 health care company that is looking to adopt AI and digital health tools across its oncology network. In December, we made the ambulatory version of Augmedix Go generally available to customers, and I'm very pleased with how it is performing. Augmedix Go is our new ambient AI product that addressed very large price segment of the market, sub-$600 per month and represents the vehicle by which we expect to realize significant penetration within health systems. Recent data from survey responses of Augmedix Go customers reveal that 94% of clinicians surveyed reported that Augmedix Go helps them better focus on their patients and clinicians save up to 1 hour or more per day using that product. This aligns with our philosophy of enabling clinicians to see the patient and trust the technology to do its work in the background. So very early in its deployment, initial orders have met our expectations and we expect adoption will continue to build throughout the year and beyond. We've also been developing a version of Augmedix Go specifically designed for the challenging conditions of the emergency department. There are very few competing products commercially deployed in this important sector of the market. We are pleased with initial results thus far and expect to make Augmedix Go for the ED generally available by the end of this month. At the same time, our strategic partner, HCA Healthcare has been testing the [indiscernible] department version of Augmedix Go in its own hospitals. HCA is preparing to evaluate this version of Augmedix Go in advance of a broad rollout across its network of hospitals. We are confident we will realize the full potential of this significant opportunity and we'll update you as soon as we reach the next meaningful milestone. At the HIMSS conference last week, I was on a panel with HCA and Google, during which, HCA delivered encouraging commentary on both the GO ER pilot and our portfolio of products. HCA also stated its intention to deploy our solutions into other departments within their system. Augmedix Go is being offered at 2 service levels. The base level is a self-serve version wherein Augmedix provides no human assistance in creating the medical note. The note is automatically generated and available for review and sign off with the clinician within a minute or 2 following the patient encounter. The base version of Augmedix Go is the least expensive for the customer and most scalable product among our portfolio. The premium version is called Go Assist. At the discretion of the clinician, the draft note is simultaneously delivered to an Augmedix medical documentation specialist who have used for quality assurance and make any necessary edits before clinicians sign off. Go Assist comes at a slightly higher price than the base version of Go. Augmedix Go sits alongside our live product, the highest level of service where a remote medical documentation specialist is matched with a clinician throughout the clinician's shift. And this leads to what is truly unique about Augmedix approach. Our recognition that doctors' needs are diverse and ever-changing and we have developed the broadest portfolio of solutions to address those needs. Moreover, we offer customers fungibility across our products, whereby clinicians can switch between different products and service levels to address their varying needs. This flexibility provides doctors with a higher touch level of service when they're shorthanded or dealing with more complex cases while also allowing them to save on documentation costs for more routine patient encounters. As Augmedix offers solutions from self-service ambient AI to remote human support in one suite, health systems can cover all of their documentation needs under one agreement and seamless integration process. The AI solutions in the market do not have this breadth of offerings. We see a lot of AI hype and claims made by several AI-only newcomers trying to break into the market. Generative AI tools are clearly capable of doing much of the heavy lifting when it comes to medical note documentation. However, it takes a great deal more than off-the-shelf generative AI tools to produce accurate and comprehensive medical notes consistently across a wide variety of specialties and patient encounters. When harnessed properly, generative AI has the potential to substantially ease and lower the cost of medical documentation. As the pioneer in ambient virtual medical documentation, over the past 11 years, we have built a vast repository of domain knowledge pertaining to clinician workflows and medical data sets. This knowledge has enabled us to address multiple care settings serve more than 50 specialties, provide clinical decision support to the point of care at the right moment and deliver structured data that positively impacts customers' downstream activities such as billing. These points of differentiation in conjunction with our 2-way communication channel to the point of care, provide significant moat around our business. Now I'd like to discuss some of the financial highlights of our strong fourth quarter. We delivered a 45% increase in revenue to $12.7 million, ahead of our most recent guidance driven by a 44% increase in clinicians and service and net revenue retention of 152%. Our largest customers are increasingly adopting our high ROI products. Additionally, we demonstrated the scalability of our business model by increasing gross profit by 54% to $6.2 million, a 300 basis point improvement in gross margin year-over-year to 49.3% and driving meaningful improvement in our adjusted EBITDA and GAAP operating losses. We also bolstered our capital resources through our November equity offering which generated over $26 million in net proceeds to further solidify our leadership position in our industry by expanding our commercial and engineering teams to enable us to accelerate our growth relative to our previous plan. We have already begun to grow our team with some very strong hires. And as we complete the expansion over the coming months, we expect to realize the payback on this later this year and more meaningfully in 2025, which is what we communicated during the capital raise. Our most recent capital raise has enabled us to take a more aggressive approach towards a large underpenetrated market, where customers are adopting generative AI technology at an increasing rate. Our established market presence compared to AI-only newcomers will continue to serve us well. We've expanded our sales organization to bolster our efforts to land new enterprises and to further expand within our existing enterprise accounts. We believe now is the optimal time to lean into our advantages and accelerate our growth initiatives to capture market share and exploit our leadership position. This market is still in its infancy. I am confident that our portfolio approach that addresses the major price points within this market will resonate with health care systems and clinicians. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Paul Ginocchio, our Chief Financial Officer, then we'll return with closing comments. Paul?

P
Paul Ginocchio
executive

Thank you, Manny. Let's review the quarter's financial highlights. Revenue for the 3 months ended December 31, 2023 was $12.7 million, slightly better than our preliminary expectations announced in January. Growth was driven by growing adoption of live and notes by existing customers. Gross margin for the fourth quarter of 2023 was 49.3% as compared to 46.3% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and compares to 49.5% in the third quarter of 2023. This 300 basis point improvement year-on-year in gross margin percentage was mainly driven by a growing scale and efficiency and also by our strategic initiative to shift U.S. clinicians serviced in the U.S. to outside the U.S. Gross profit growth was 54% year-on-year. Total operating expenses for the fourth quarter of 2023 were $10.6 million, up 12% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022. Our gross profit growth outpacing OpEx growth resulted in a reduction of our operating losses by over $1.1 million year-on-year. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $3.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to a loss of $4.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Along with this improvement in adjusted EBITDA was a year-on-year improvement in our adjusted EBITDA margin from negative 51% in the year ago quarter to negative 26% in this quarter. Note, beginning this quarter, we have modified the calculation of adjusted EBITDA to remove the interest income benefit that we are now earning due to the larger cash balance after the equity financing in November 2023 as well as foreign exchange gains and losses, both of which we deem to be nonoperational in nature. All prior amounts have been recast to conform with this current presentation. Under the prior definition, adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2023 would have been slightly better at a loss of $2.8 million. Cash flow from operating activities was an outflow of $0.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared to an outflow of $4.4 million in the fourth quarter of last year. Now turning to the full year results. Total revenue was $44.9 million, an increase of 45% compared to $30.9 million. Dollar-based net revenue retention was 148% for our Health Enterprise comers compared to 128% in 2022. Our gross profit increased 54% to $21.5 million or a 48.0% gross profit margin, up from $14 million or a 45.1% gross profit margin. Operating expenses were $40.3 million compared to $36.3 million. Adjusted operating expenses, which excludes stock-based compensation in both periods, grew 11% to $37.8 million compared to $34.2 million. GAAP net loss was $19.2 million compared to $24.4 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss declined to $15.2 million from $19.4 million. At December 31, 2023, we had $46.2 million in cash and cash equivalents as compared to $21.3 million as of December 31, 2022. This reflects the $26.3 million in net proceeds from the equity offering in November 2023 and the $11.8 million of net proceeds from the equity offering in April. Our weighted average share count for EPS for the fourth quarter was 49.0 million shares -- common shares outstanding, and that reflects a partial quarter of the additional 7.2 million shares we issued in November and includes the $4.375 million prefunded warrants. As of year-end, our common shares outstanding plus prefunded warrants totaled $53.0 million. Assuming all the warrants outstanding are net exercised and all of our employee options and SARs that are both fully invested and in the money, our net exercise. We would have [indiscernible] 57.1 million shares outstanding. Overall, 2023 was a significant year for Augmedix with robust revenue growth, gross margin expansion, disciplined expense management and narrowing losses. Additionally, we meaningfully strengthened our balance sheet during the year providing the necessary capital for us to execute our updated and accelerated strategic plans and capture a significant share of this growing opportunity. Now moving on to guidance. Due to the solid finish of 2023 and the trends we were seeing in 2024, we are providing revenue guidance of $60 million to $62 million for the full year of 2024. Turning to the outlook for the first quarter of 2024. We expect revenue in the first quarter to be approximately $13.4 million. We expect GAAP gross margins to be lower quarter-on-quarter by about 300 basis points due to temporary costs from both our move to the new building in Bangladesh and a onetime optimization initiative in India. We expect gross margins to resume their upward trajectory in May. As we have previously stated, we anticipate GO revenue to be modest during the first half of 2024. We do expect Go to have a positive contribution later in the year and then to contribute more materially in 2025. In terms of modeling operating expenses to reflect the deployment of the equity proceeds. As we articulated during November equity raise, our plan is to invest an incremental $9 million in 2024 versus our previous plan, largely in sales and marketing but also in engineering with a modest amount in G&A. Combined with the increase in underlying operating expenses associated with the strong current growth of our business, it would be appropriate to expect GAAP operating expenses to be in the mid to upper $50 million range in 2024. At this point, I'd like to turn the call back to Manny for closing comments.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Thank you, Paul. We remain committed to playing an essential role in unburdening clinicians and improving the operating efficiency of health care organizations. We have built a broad portfolio of products and are positioning Augmedix as an effective information data delivery platform at the point of care. This unique positioning will help ensure we continue our rapid growth well into the future. I've never been more excited about the opportunities in front of Augmedix and want to thank our team and our customers for helping us deliver another quarter and full year of strong financial results. Thank you very much. With that, we'll now open it up to questions. Operator?

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Daniels with William Blair.

R
Ryan Daniels
analyst

Congrats on the strong performance. If we look to the HCA rollout, can you give us a little bit more detail on that regarding if that's just going to be in the emergency department at first? Or when they go system-wide, do they anticipate kind of broadening that out into other specialties as well?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Ryan, good question. So there are multiple thrusts within HCA in terms of rollout. The one that obviously we've been talking about the most is in the emerging department. And as you know, we're currently deployed in 4 hospitals at HCA and that deployment, the plan for broadening that deployment is going according to schedule. So we anticipate that occurring throughout the year. But beyond that, we are already seeing deployment of our products in other areas, other departments within HCA, and there are plans to accelerate that deployment very soon.

R
Ryan Daniels
analyst

Okay. And given the operating environment, in an emergency department, both kind of the cast -- multiple doctors and contiguous conversations. I assume that once it's built there, you don't really have to do a lot of work to take it into other specialties or clinical areas. Is that fair?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Well, sorry, there are some things that do overlap with other departments, but there's certain things in the emerging department that are unique to the emerging department. Being able to flip in and out of different patient EHRs as you follow the path of the doctor would be the same for hospitals, for example, and for nurses. But on the clinical side, it's not -- that's not the case. It's not necessary. They follow a schedule, a patient schedule. It's fixed predetermined before the day starts. So it's quite -- it's a very linear workflow. So it's a lot easier to develop a product, which we've done already for the clinical side of the house.

R
Ryan Daniels
analyst

Okay. Helpful. And then 2 more quick ones. Just in regards to the premium govern, I think you referred to it as Go Assist. Was that a novel launch based on feedback you're getting from clinicians that they want to still involve a medical document specialists to make it even simpler for them to just review and sign off? Or is that something you're proactively putting in the market just to have kind of the broadest product offering of any vendor in the space?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Well, everything that we build is based on feedback we get from the market from our customers and prospective customers. So we had heard that I say, everything that comes out of the back end is perfect or that doctors have an infinite amount of time to devote to medical documentation. That's not reality. And so there needs to be a solution to address either time constraints on the part of the doctor or limitations of the technology when it comes to more complex types of encounters. And that led us to develop this particular product. It's a hybrid product where at the flip of the switch, the clinician can choose to get some support to the extent they feel it's necessary.

R
Ryan Daniels
analyst

Okay. Perfect. And then, Paul, maybe one for you, and I'll hop off. In regards to the gross margins, I appreciate the color on Q1 and some of the onetime items related to India. For the full year, however, do you still think the year-over-year gross margins will be able to expand? Or will this kind of transitory push in Q1, keep them down year-over-year for the full year?

P
Paul Ginocchio
executive

I think on a year-on-year basis, they'll be up. Obviously, we'll exit the year and better than we will have in the first quarter. But overall, I would expect some gross margin expansion.

R
Ryan Daniels
analyst

Congrats again.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of [ Elizabeth Anderson ] with Evercore.

U
Unknown Analyst

Congrats on a nice quarter and outlook. I guess maybe just to follow up on Ryan's question. In terms of the HCA rollout, maybe specific to the emergency department, do you have any current indications from HCA that sort of when they're expecting that to start rolling out? Or is that still sort of in flux at this point?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

We have a general idea that they want to make it happen as soon as possible. They have a formal process that they go through in terms of evaluation of the initial users and the data from their use of the product. And they have certain criteria that they'd like us to achieve. And I think we're well on the way to meeting those goals. So my best guess is that it's going to happen very soon within less than a month.

U
Unknown Analyst

Great. That's helpful to hear. And then just on your hiring, obviously, you've made a number of hires since the equity raise. How do you feel about where you are in terms of your -- that $9 million of incremental investment? Do you have all the people in place? Are there sort of any key areas that you're still waiting to hire? Any more color on that would be helpful.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. We're well underway, but we're not -- we haven't completed the hires yet. So we have a very specific plan of who we're going to hire, what physicians, what department, et cetera. And I'd say, and Paul can chime in on this, we're probably about 2/3 of the way through that hiring process.

U
Unknown Analyst

Got it. Super helpful. And does the 4Q '23 provider count include any Go users?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

It does not. Historically, we've included [ live in ] notes. We will factor that in as this year progresses. There are Go users. We're still working to make sure that we conform to how we've done historically done it.

U
Unknown Analyst

Got it. And then in terms of just talking about the Go Assist version, how do we think about the sort of gross margin at maturity for that? Is sort of -- between the sort of premium version, should we still think of them being above 60%, that's still like the right way to think about that gross margin profile of those combined Go and Go Assist products?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. I would -- we've stated that Go be north of 60% margin product. And we've said historically that Augmedix Notes was 55% to 60% So right in that area where to assist and hopefully, over time, as we scale, it gets better.

U
Unknown Analyst

Super helpful. Thanks and congrats again.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Aaron Wukmir with Lyric Capital Markets.

A
Aaron Wukmir
analyst

This is Aaron on the line for Brooks. Congrats on the strong quarter. So I guess -- do you feel that the open platform partnerships have been materializing to your likeness and generating some impact with your customers? If you could just give us a sense as to what you've been seeing there, that would be helpful.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Sure, Aaron. We haven't deployed anything yet. We're still developing the product. But if you recall, the impacts for doing this came from our customers, in particular, HCA. So we anticipate that HCA will be a source of demand for these particular products and they'll be on our platform. We will book the revenue, but we haven't completed the integration with, for example, with the Sullivan Group, where it's underway. That work is underway. Work is underway with Ellipsis, the behavioral health application. So those are underway. They will be deployed this year, but there's no there's no response yet from the market because they haven't been deployed.

A
Aaron Wukmir
analyst

Okay. And then I guess as you start beginning to roll out Go, do you expect any significant product mix shift? I guess, just trends that you're expecting throughout the remainder of the year would be helpful as well.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Well, you have to, I think, distinguish between users and revenue. And from a user perspective, yes, I do expect there to be a shift in favor of Go as it grows faster than our other products, our legacy products. From a revenue perspective, because the ARPU is so much lower for GO than it is for our legacy products. I don't think you'll see a similar realignment of the revenue mix in '24.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Allen Klee with Maxim Group.

A
Allen Klee
analyst

I'm so sorry about that. The competitive environment, can you discuss a little some -- there's been some companies that have gotten funding and also your comments on a bunch of people doing AI models. What were that -- 2 things about that. One, would that kind of imply that like there's going to be pricing pressure for the main players in the industry coming up. And along with that, like if somebody choose -- if they have a doctor that chooses to go, are they displacing one of your services like my or more often, do you think they would be displacing something like a competitor?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Allen, good question. So just broadly in terms of the competitive landscape, yes, there have been several newcomers in the space, which is we anticipated well over a year ago. All that does is basically reinforce the fact that our belief that this is a very large market, very attractive market, and therefore, it's going to attract competitors and venture capitalists who want to take advantage of that big opportunity. Having said that, the companies that you're describing that have announced large raises recently, one in particular, that's probably commanded most of the airwaves has 65 employees. So they -- what they still need to do is build the infrastructure that is necessary to support wide-scale deployment of their product. We've made that investment already. So we are -- we've got the infrastructure in place to deploy widely at scale. And so we anticipate that these smaller companies, these newer companies are going to have to do the same thing. They're going to have to make those investments in infrastructure to be able to scale. Now the second part of your question, sorry, refresh my memory.

A
Allen Klee
analyst

Okay. So disposition.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. So in terms of cannibalization of products, we haven't seen that -- and we don't anticipate it primarily because at HCA in particular, there's little live that's there to be displaced, number one. So it's mostly greenfield HCA, I mean, vastly greenfield at HCA. So there's little opportunity for any kind of cannibalization. But more broadly, across our -- all of our customers, -- we don't think so. We believe that GO will cater to a distinct persona and price point in the market, quite different from the [ Persona ] and price point of live customers. And we tested this belief when we launched our Notes product a couple of years ago and found that there was virtually no cannibalization of our live product when we launched Notes at an ARPU that was less than half that of live. Does that answer your question, Allen?

A
Allen Klee
analyst

Yes. One last question. Your guidance where you said that the first quarter will be lower by 300 basis points due to some temporary costs related in Bangladesh and cost initiatives in India. Could you explain a little what you're -- what do you think the impact of these extra costs that you're taking on? I mean it's felt for some people that if you're really a technology company why haven't the [ droppable ] you seem to have like a lot of cost and maybe you're lessing that with what you're doing in India, but I don't know. Could you help us understand that?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Sure, Allen. As we stand today, the vast majority of our revenue is still delivered by Augmedix Live, our legacy historical premium product. So that's still a human in the loop that we have an MDS that works with the clinician. So we moved -- as we've grown, we've moved to a bigger office location in Daka in Bangladesh, and we are sunsetting the old building that we've been in since 2018 -- maybe 2017. And so we've got a few months of dupli costs there, rent, transportation, food. So we're -- we're running that for 2 buildings. We've also in India -- sorry, in India, optimizing our service delivery to make sure we have the highest quality service at the best price. And so we're doing that. And there's going to be about 3 months of overlap that will end in early May around that initiative. And those things combined are basically the entire decline in gross margin quarter-on-quarter.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of [ Yan Zi ] with B. Riley Securities.

U
Unknown Analyst

Many congrats on the long-term goal and great to hear, let's say, about one hour for doctors. So can you talk about some of the enhancements you recently added to go in the ambulatory setting and will those enhancements be also added to the ER setting as well. Particularly factors are facing a nonlinear workflow in the emergency room setting.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Right. So we're always enhancing our products. We've been releasing new features and enhancements to go almost on a weekly basis at this point. And so there are too many to rig count now, but they're all designed to improve the experience and to deliver greater utility to the health care enterprise. And you're right to point out that the products are designed differently between the clinical setting and the acute care setting. For the emerging department, you have a different section in the medical note that you had to create from scratch is called the MDS NDM, which is essentially -- it's the medical decision-making that's occurring in the emergency room. And that is not part of the standard note format for clinical -- for the clinical visit. So we had to define that. We had to get input from the EHR data that comes in, in the form of labs and so forth. We had to be able to input those into the application as close to real time as possible so that the clinician knows at any given moment, the updated status of a patient so that they know when to return back to that patient to resume their encounter in the emergency department. So these are some of the things that we've been doing. We keep adding to the feature set for each product as we iterate and get feedback from our customers.

P
Paul Ginocchio
executive

Remember, one of the -- maybe the biggest sort of enhancements we've made since we launched Go over the last 6 months is continuing to add additional specialties. As you heard many say, we now service 50 specialties. We'll continue to go deeper in a few key specialties, but we go now supports, obviously, over 50 specialist. That's been a big enhancement over the last 4 or 5 months.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Right. And that just we just reduced that like a little over a week ago.

U
Unknown Analyst

Got it. Yes, that's very helpful. Additional color there. Maybe one last one for me. Can you clarify the difference to go assist the premier version versus the notes such as level of enrollment from medical document specialists or AI contribution?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

In terms of the workflow and the utility, there's very little difference. However, Notes will be sunset and it will be replaced by Go Assist. And the reason for that is we want to provide our customers with a seamless experience, allowing them to transition from one to the other on demand as they need it. If you have 2 independent applications, there's -- it's more laborious to go from one app to another. So we wanted to eliminate that duality and just have it appear in one seamless range of service that you get from one application.

Operator

Our question is a follow-up question from the line of Allen Klee with Maxim Group.

A
Allen Klee
analyst

Yes. For the $9 million of incremental spending from the capital raised, should -- is it fair to assume that it's going to take longer to deploy it all and hiring in different things? So that should grow kind of incrementally as we go throughout the year rather than straight line?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. Yes. Allen, One, we have done a really good job. The team here has done a great job of -- as soon as we made the decision to raise capital, we started starting opening some hiring process. So we were able to get a little bit ahead of it, but obviously not start until we had raised the capital. The team has done a great job of hitting the goals. Obviously, it's -- we're hiring quite a few people. So I think we're -- as Manny said, where 2/3 of that hiring is already complete with more people coming on. We made some approvals today. We have done some projects here in the first quarter. So I'd say we're fully -- it's going to be fully reflected here in the second quarter with a lot of it reflected in the first.

Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Bill Sutherland with the Benchmark Company.

W
William Sutherland
analyst

Manny, I just have a product question. I haven't heard about Augmedix prep in a while. I didn't know if that became a significant product for you guys.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. So good question. Bill, we actually -- I just signed an order for more prep at one of our biggest customers. So it seems to be getting some traction. It's still a fraction of our revenues relative to our other products. But it's there, it does fill a need, and we will continue to make it available to the market. And I suspect that the demand for it will expand as people become more aware of it.

W
William Sutherland
analyst

Okay. Well-timed question, I think. And then on your partnership with Google, maybe update us in terms of the components of that, what's perhaps based on the original partnership, how that's -- what's the most important aspects of it as that's developed for you guys? And what do you kind of hold your expectations going forward?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Sure. Good question, Bill. So the partnership is really predicated on 2 principal thrusts. One is technology. So we utilize Google technology in our platform. And the second thrust is go-to-market. So Google cloud is our biggest, most important channel partner, if you will. And we've had some very -- obviously, HCA is the biggest success, but we've had other successes with -- through Google Cloud -- and we are actively pursuing some significant opportunities again through that relationship. It's been a fantastic partnership. And we don't we see more of that transpiring throughout the course of '24 and beyond.

W
William Sutherland
analyst

Have you seen the health systems utilizing the Google Cloud marketplace to purchase your [indiscernible]?

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Yes. In fact, we have. And there's a whole process you have to go -- administrative process you have to go through to enable that, and we've already done that with Paul [indiscernible] HCA. I think that's public. And we're working on doing that with another health system as well. So that's going to be a standard part of that of that go-to-market strategy.

Operator

There are no further questions in the queue. I'd like to hand it back to management for closing remarks.

E
Emmanuel Krakaris
executive

Well, I just want to conclude by reiterating that we had a really, really solid 2023, very pleased with the company's performance. And looking forward, really, we're putting in all the necessary ingredients to ensure that we have a very, very competitive set of products that the market wants to buy and the market is growing very quickly for health care, in particular. It's adopting new technology at an unprecedented rate, and we believe we are building the right infrastructure and products take full advantage of it. So I'm looking forward to a very exciting 2024 and beyond for the company. Thank you.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.

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