Tennr is a company that built the first orchestration platform and language models designed to automate the labor-intensive workflows of referral-based care. The company has announced a $101 million Series C funding round led by IVP, with participation from new and existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, ICONIQ, Foundation Capital, and Frank Slootman.
Problem being addressed: Every year, more than one-third of Americans are referred for specialty care, imaging, equipment, or treatment. However, for specialists on the receiving end, offering a positive experience to those patients can be challenging. And they arrive via fax, email, or e-portal, often requiring hours of manual review and back-and-forth communication. And so backlogs quickly pile up. That leads to missed patients, more denials, and weeks of delays, even for care that’s urgently needed.
Tennr helps providers convert more patients, cut denials, and deliver care without growing their teams. And Tennr’s goal is to convert more patients and increase visibility across the entire referral process. And now, the company is launching Tennr Network. This new coordination layer connects referring providers, receiving providers, and patients, giving each party real-time visibility into the referral status.
— Referring providers can view the current status of every patient they’ve referred, eliminating phone tag and guesswork.
— Receiving providers can track the status of every referral, see which need more documentation, and identify which sources are driving the most conversions.
— Patients can see when their referral was accepted, when it’s scheduled, and what they can expect to pay. This brings the kind of transparency we take for granted in food delivery or e-commerce.
Tennr utilizes the combination of an enterprise orchestration engine and a series of specialized language models (RaeLM) trained on the nuances of processing medical documentation against strict payer criteria. Unlike generic large language models, RaeLM was optimized to understand the nuanced data in medical determinations across years of records. It evaluates documents against complex payer criteria to flag potential denials.
Momentum: The company has helped process millions of patients across hundreds of providers and has more than tripled its revenue since its Series B just two quarters ago.
Founders: Tennr was founded by engineers Trey Holterman, Diego Baugh, and Tyler Johnson, who met at Stanford. And Holterman learned about the ‘black hole’ of the referral maze from his mom (experienced in working in family medicine), who showed him how chaotic and slow the handoff between providers could be. Baugh then experienced it personally as a patient when six-week delays between GI appointments sent him to the ER in college.
KEY QUOTES:
“Patients really shouldn’t vanish into a work queue. There’s so much opportunity to build a delightful patient experience, but it’s always failed because we expect so much behavior change from providers who are completely overwhelmed. We flipped that thinking and are now creating visibility for the patient flow without changing how people work. Businesses love it because they’re converting far more patients and providing a 10x experience for patients and referral sources.”
Tennr co-founder and CEO Trey Holterman
“Tennr has revolutionized our fax-to-intake workflow, eliminating hundreds of hours of manual effort each day, removing human errors, and accelerating the creation of patient intakes. We’ve redefined operational agility in our revenue cycle—it’s not just about moving faster—it’s about serving healthcare practitioners and patients more effectively, in alignment with our mission of Serving You Better.”
Ty Barnett, CIO at Norco
“Forcing healthcare providers to change the way they refer their patients doesn’t work. Many have tried. Tennr is the first company that works the way healthcare already does: no EMR rip-outs, no need to retrain providers, no changes to how documentation is shared. By combining deep customer empathy for specialist workflows with technical excellence, Tennr builds software that actually gets used because it works with the system, not against it.”
Zeya Yang, Partner at IVP
