TriFetch, a San Francisco-based AI automation platform built for independent specialty clinics, has raised a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from angels with backgrounds at Google, Hippocratic, Mercor, and MIT. The company is emerging from stealth with a platform designed to automate the three workflows that dominate clinic operating costs: patient calls and scheduling, referral processing, and prior authorizations.
Independent specialty clinics face the same administrative load as large health systems with a fraction of the staff. A single prior authorization can consume 45 minutes of staff time, referral coordination can mean hours on hold, and unanswered patient calls pile up in inboxes with hundreds of unread messages. TriFetch targets these bottlenecks with a unified, EMR-agnostic platform that integrates into a clinic’s existing operations without requiring EHR migration or staff retraining, connecting directly with systems including NextGen, eClinicalWorks, and Athena.
The platform’s multilingual voice agent handles patient calls end to end, including inbound inquiries, outbound scheduling, and follow-ups. Its referral engine routes and processes referrals, verifies eligibility, and books patients with humans in the loop. Its prior authorization automation submits and tracks requests to prevent paperwork delays from pushing costs onto patients. For a mid-size specialty practice, TriFetch estimates the range of recovered costs and captured revenue can run from $500,000 to $1.4 million annually.
TriFetch is currently running active pilots across specialty clinics in California, including ophthalmology, cardiology, and gastroenterology practices. In one GI practice, two staff members previously worked full-time processing up to 100 referrals per day. TriFetch now handles that workflow end to end, freeing roughly 16 hours of staff time daily and returning more than $200,000 per year to the clinic.
The company was co-founded by Varuni Sarwal and Rosemary He, who met while completing PhDs in Computer Science at UCLA, where they each conducted research at the intersection of AI and healthcare, publishing in venues including Nature and ICML. TriFetch is supported by a founding cohort of more than 10 strategic advisors drawn from leading health systems, including Sutter Health, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, UW Health, and UChicago Medicine, as well as former NextGen co-founder Tim Eggena.
KEY QUOTES:
“Clinics are doing everything they can to keep up, but the administrative workload keeps expanding. We built TriFetch to plug into how clinics already run and take the tasks staff dread the most off their plate, calls, referrals, and prior auth, so teams can focus on the parts of care that require the human touch.”
Varuni Sarwal, CEO and Co-Founder, TriFetch
“Clinics don’t need more software where every new tool adds another tab, another login, another thing to learn. They need less friction. TriFetch integrates as the connective tissue of a clinic’s existing operations, adapting to the clinic’s ecosystem and not the other way around.”
Rosemary He, COO and Co-Founder, TriFetch
“Varuni and Rose are deep domain experts in healthcare AI. Healthcare administrative workflows represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for AI, and the TriFetch team is uniquely positioned to unlock it. They combine deep AI capabilities with real-world clinical understanding to build what we believe can become a category-defining company in healthcare AI.”
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Partner, Nexus Venture Partners
“Clinics up and down the US are facing the same administrative headache. Working with TriFetch, we’ve been able to relieve our staff from managing patient calls and scheduling, freeing them up from hundreds of voicemails and phone calls to focus on the patients in front of them. AI can be incredibly powerful when adopted safely, and I can’t think of a better team to trust with that in my clinic.”
Dr. Shashi Ganti, Ophthalmologist, Cal Retina MD
