Company leader
Erez Druk
Co-Founder and CEO
Freed
Erez Druk is co-founder and chief executive of Freed. Freed is an AI scribe. It listens to a visit and drafts the note, including the subjective, objective, assessment, and plan sections, so the clinician is not left to type that note at night.
From Israel to Facebook
He grew up in Israel, where he obsessed over the saxophone in fourth grade and later became the country's board game champion. He studied mathematics and computer science at the Technion, an engineering university in Israel, and earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree there.
He moved to the United States to work as a software engineer at Facebook. A roommate in company housing handed him The Lean Startup, and he read it in a few days. Running a startup, he said, is "the hardest thing I've ever done, the most intense school I've been to."
His first company, UrbanLeap, made software for local governments running public procurement, the process those governments use to buy goods and services. UrbanLeap helped more than 40 local governments, and he later shut it down. The lesson he took was to build for a user he knew well.
Building Freed for His Wife
That user was his wife, Dr. Gabriella Meckler, a family physician. For years he watched her open charts after she got home, including past midnight. For seven years he heard "I have notes to do" every day. She asked, as a joke, whether he could write her notes.
He built a rough version of Freed in a few hours. It drafted the instructions a clinician sends after a visit and the subjective section, where the note records how the patient feels. In January 2023 he and Andrey Bannikov co-founded Freed. Bannikov is a Facebook engineer.
Within four months of launch, 1,500 clinicians were using Freed for notes. In March 2025 Sequoia Capital led a $30 million Series A, with Scale Venture Partners, Daniel Gross, and Ted Zagat in the round.
Coffee in the Bay Area
He has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, for many years. He likes exercising and reading, and his favorite outing is a cappuccino and a pastry at a coffee shop with his wife, though at home he makes coffee with an AeroPress.