Tennr co-founder Diego Baugh first encountered a nightmare in the patient’s referral system when he was hospitalized for a stomach problem during college. He was told to meet with experts but didn’t hear from them for six weeks. He decided not to arrange a date, but was hospitalized again. Six weeks later before he heard from the experts.
This problem has proven to be common in the knotted bureaucracy throughout the U.S. health care system. Delayed, denial and discarded services are common after frontline medicine (primary care, emergency care and emergency rooms) pass on patients to specialists.
Baugh and his co-founders Trey Holterman and Tyler Johnson have been working on this issue since they founded the startup Tennr in 2021. The New York-based company has exploded for just a few years and recently ended its $101 million C round, wealth Exclusive report can be reported that the $37 million Series B ended in less than a year.
The new round, led by venture capital firm IVP, with participation from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, TENNR is worth $605 million, making it one of the fastest-growing health technology startups in the vertically growing AI companies increasingly dominate.
Although TENNR has built and trained its own proprietary model to help parse patient documents and doctor’s notes, Holterman (he is Tennr’s CEO) said he is trying to avoid using the company as another AI healthcare company.
He told him: “I want to talk about the problem, I want to talk about the solution.” wealth. “I don’t want to talk about this technology.”
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Before establishing TENNR, Holterman had been interested in healthcare, working as a software engineer at Medicare Platform Health IQ and Fitness Company Strava. However, the idea of addressing patient referrals was born out of the experience of his co-founder. Holtman joked, “I probably should have listened to my mom earlier, and I think this is a story that everyone knows.”
As he digs further, he learned that while one-third of Americans are referred to professional care or some form of follow-up treatment every year, more than half of them never go to the next step. The goal of TENNR is to create a system that will help decipher complex paperwork networks to help automate processes and figure out key details such as qualifications, benefits, and payer rules.
Even before Chatgpt broke out on the scene at the end of 2022, the founders of Tennr began building their own professional model, which received tens of millions of medical documentation training and designed specifically for use cases recommended for patients. Holterman says that even if generalized AI models for companies such as OpenAI and Humans are becoming increasingly common, Tennr is excellent in this application because it is ingesting super-specific information types that don’t make a broader competitor pursue, such as figuring out how to interpret the scrap mess of famous boring doctors. “Betting open source, betting on the proprietary data sets we accumulate, continues to completely crush the benchmark,” Holterman said. (TENNR complies with regulations such as HIPAA that passes de-identification.)
While the referral system appears to be a niche, IVP partner Zeya Yang said Tennr has found a strategic wedge that serves experts, primary care physicians and patients. Young first invested in Tennr’s Series A Series A when Andreessen Horowitz and decided to lead its series after joining the IVP in 2024.
He said that potential growth areas for TENNR include addressing new subverticals in the medical profession, which is currently the company’s main customer base, and selling new tools in the referral workflow, such as validating insurance information. He told wealth. TENNR is already expanding its products to create a networking feature that enables visibility into the referral and payment process for primary care physicians and patients.
Although Holterman refused to provide specific financial data for the business, he said the company falls under eight revenue figures, which tripled when it held Series B in October. As people and companies increasingly research off-the-shelf solutions for AI to meet their medical needs, he bet that Tennr’s professional approach will provide better solutions. “It’s not automation,” he said. “It’s really about making sure patients are really getting services and knowing what it’s going to cost so they can show up.”
