Forus (company)
Forus (formerly Tandem) is an American health technology company, based in New York City, that uses AI agents to handle the administrative work between a doctor writing a prescription and a patient starting treatment: prior authorizations, insurance appeals, financial-assistance enrollment and pharmacy routing.[1][2] Sahir Jaggi, a former product leader at the health insurer Oscar, founded the company as Tandem in 2023.[2] The service is free for doctors and patients; according to Forbes, the company makes its money through agreements with pharmaceutical companies that want their drugs to reach patients.[2] Tandem took the Forus name on May 12, 2026, when it announced $160 million in funding and told Forbes it had reached a $1 billion valuation.[1][2] On September 8, 2026, Forus announced a $150 million Series C round led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $3 billion valuation, which brought its total funding to more than $300 million.[3][4]
Name
Until May 2026 the company operated as Tandem, at the website withtandem.com, and its site footer gave the legal name Tandem Technology, Inc.[5] On May 12, 2026, it published an announcement introducing "Forus (formerly Tandem)".[1] Its website footer now reads Forus Inc.[6]
The company is unrelated to Forus Health, a maker of retinal imaging devices based in Bengaluru, India, and to Tandem Health, which sells a clinical AI assistant to care providers in Europe.[7][8] The similar names have caused confusion in coverage: a March 2026 Forbes article about a competitor referred to "Stockholm-based Tandem Technology, reportedly in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation", figures that match Bloomberg's January 2026 report on the New York company.[9][10]
History
Founding
Jaggi grew up in upstate New York, the son of Indian immigrants, and earned an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Columbia University.[2] He then joined Oscar, the health insurer co-founded by Thrive Capital managing partner Josh Kushner, where he worked as a product leader. "I spent five years at Oscar, and every year I learned more about how complicated the system was and how hard it was to change from within even with the best of intentions and a lot of resources," he told Forbes.[2] Forbes counted him among dozens of Oscar alumni who have started companies, a group that includes the founders of Formation Bio and Garner Health.[2]
He started Tandem in 2023 to build AI software for the administrative side of prescriptions.[2] Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 Healthcare list for 2025; his Forbes list profile described Tandem as a "prescription access service" and said he had raised tens of millions of dollars from investors including General Catalyst and Thrive Capital, including a $7 million seed round.[11]
Tandem (2023 to 2026)
Tandem's early service was sold as an outsourced service rather than as software for a practice's staff to run. Its page for doctors, as archived in February 2024, said Tandem was already listed in electronic health record (EHR) systems as "Tandem Pharmacy (Boise, ID)", so a practice could send it a prescription like any other pharmacy. Tandem then completed prior authorization forms, gathered records, called insurers and other third parties, and routed the prescription to the patient's preferred pharmacy or to the specialty pharmacy the patient's benefit manager required.[12] The page said Tandem was "not a tool that your team operates" but "a fully outsourced solution", staffed by "an experienced team of pharmacists and pharmacy techs that are supported by our proprietary AI platform", and that it used existing services such as CoverMyMeds and Surescripts.[12]
According to Fierce Healthcare, the company first launched in dermatology and later expanded into gastroenterology and autoimmune specialties.[13] In November 2024 Tandem's careers page said the company was adding thousands of new patients each week, which it attributed entirely to word of mouth, and was "on track to reach millions in 2025"; it named Thrive Capital and General Catalyst as investors and described a team working from an office in SoHo.[5] Tech Funding News later reported that the two firms led a $30 million Series A round in 2024.[14]
In January 2026, Bloomberg News reported that Tandem had reached a $1 billion valuation and was raising $100 million in a round led by Accel, citing unnamed sources. According to PYMNTS's account of that report, the company had raised $137 million to date.[10] Tech Funding News reported that the deal had not been publicly announced and that the company did not respond to requests for comment.[14] On April 2, 2026, Tandem and OpenEvidence, the AI medical search company, announced a partnership linking OpenEvidence's evidence-based clinical decision support with Tandem's prescription generation and prior authorization submission, so that clinicians could review medical evidence and start a prescription and authorization request in the same workflow.[15][16]
Rebrand and Series B (May 2026)
On May 12, 2026, the company introduced the Forus name and announced that it had raised $160 million from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, BoxGroup and Pear VC.[1] Forbes reported the same day that Forus said it had reached a $1 billion valuation with $160 million in total funding, and that Thrive Capital, General Catalyst and Accel had each led a previously unannounced round.[2] AlleyWatch listed the newest round as a $123 million Series B that brought the company's total reported equity funding to $160 million.[17] Fierce Healthcare later described the May financing as a $160 million Series B.[13]
Forus told Forbes that its annualized revenue had passed $10 million by the end of 2025 and had roughly quintupled since then, which Forbes said meant annualized revenue was tracking above $50 million as of May 2026.[2] In its own announcement the company said provider adoption had grown tenfold year over year for two years, that it supported patients in nearly 80 percent of US zip codes, that five of the 10 largest global biopharma companies worked with it, and that it had about 100 engineers and operators in New York.[1]
AGA partnership and Series C (July to September 2026)
On July 9, 2026, Forus and the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) announced a partnership aimed at helping patients with digestive diseases get the therapies their clinicians prescribe. The arrangement pairs the AGA's clinical guidance and advocacy work with Forus's view of where patients face delays or denials, with joint findings and resources expected as the partnership develops.[18] Jaggi told Fierce Healthcare that gastroenterology had become one of the company's largest and fastest-growing specialties.[19]
On September 8, 2026, Forus announced a $150 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation. Bain Capital Ventures led the round, and the company said every existing institutional investor reinvested, including Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures and SV Angel.[3] Kevin Zhang, a general partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said the firm had backed the company since its seed round.[20] Fierce Healthcare reported that the valuation had tripled since the May round, that Forus planned to more than double its headcount in 2026, and that it had recently expanded beyond pharmacy-benefit drugs into buy-and-bill support.[13] Jaggi said the company had begun entering oncology, neurology, primary care and metabolic health.[13]
Company-reported metrics
| Metric (as reported by the company) | May 2026 | September 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| US coverage | Patients in nearly 80% of US zip codes[1] | Patients in 85% of US residential zip codes[3] |
| Large biopharma partners | 5 of the top 10 global companies[1] | 9 of the top 15 global companies[3] |
| Total funding | $160 million[1] | More than $300 million[3] |
| Valuation | $1 billion[2] | $3 billion[3] |
| Staff | About 100 engineers and operators[1] | Plans to more than double headcount in 2026[13] |
Platform
Forus works inside a practice's existing routine. A doctor writes an electronic prescription in the EHR as usual, and Forus generates and submits the prior authorization forms.[21] Its website lists the tasks it automates as prior authorizations, appeal letters, enrollment forms, pharmacy routing, benefit verifications, specialty pharmacy calls, prior authorization renewal tracking, affordability programs and patient communication.[21] The company says it works with any drug, insurer and pharmacy, covers both pharmacy-benefit and medical-benefit workflows, and supports only electronic prescriptions sent through an EHR. Staff can track each prescription's status, and patients receive updates as it moves through coverage, pharmacy and financial-assistance steps.[21] The company states that the platform is HIPAA-compliant and SOC 2 Type 2 certified.[21]
The problem it targets is large. Fierce Healthcare, citing an American Medical Association study, reported that physicians and their staff spend more than 13 hours a week on prior authorizations.[13] Forus says more than a third of patients prescribed high-cost or complex medicines never receive their first dose.[3]
In its Series C announcement, Forus described its design as "giving every prescription its own AI agent". According to the company, each agent works like a case manager: it reasons through the patient's medical history, insurance coverage and financial situation, decides what needs to happen next, and takes action "across the portals, documents, phone calls, and faxes that the system still runs on", drawing on clinical models, specialized sub-agents and what the company has learned from millions of cases.[3] The company wrote that because the agent moves a real patient through the process rather than answering a question, its bar for accuracy is "near absolute".[3] On the company's careers page, a member of its applied AI team credited its "RAG-based appeal generator", a use of retrieval-augmented generation, with producing more overturned denials.[6]
Fierce Healthcare reported that by September 2026 the platform covered disease areas including oncology, cardiology, primary care and autoimmune conditions, care settings from clinics and infusion centers to inpatient and outpatient health systems, and both self-administered and infused drugs.[13]
Business model
Doctors and patients do not pay. Forbes reported that Forus instead has deals with pharmaceutical companies to help them launch drugs to the patients who need them, and that the company was working on several large drug launches in 2026: it works out how insurers will process a new drug and checks that pharmacies have it in stock before the first prescriptions are written.[2] The company also says the prescriptions moving through its network show where providers get stuck, where patients drop off and how medicines perform, and it uses that view to help life sciences companies design research, launch new therapies and expand access.[1][13]
Technology and research
Forus runs an engineering blog. Two posts from 2026 describe how the company builds and tests its AI systems in detail.
Evaluating an LLM judge
In a June 2026 post, Isabel Chien, a member of Forus's technical staff, described an LLM-as-a-judge system the company built to check generated prior authorization answers against a patient's clinical records and specialty-specific guidance.[22] The pipeline has four stages adapted from factual-verification work such as VeriFact and FActScore. It breaks each answer into atomic claims, expands each claim into several search queries to retrieve evidence from the patient's record, labels each claim "Supported", "Not Supported" or "Not Addressed", and flags the whole answer if any claim is unsupported.[22] The "Not Addressed" label exists because medical records are often incomplete; the post argued that treating missing evidence as a contradiction would make the judge unfairly punitive.[22]
The post said medical benchmarks such as MedQA, PubMedQA and MultiMedQA test general clinical knowledge rather than answering authorization questions about a specific patient, and that no standardized benchmark exists for that task.[22] To measure how often the judge catches errors, the team took correct answers from a gold-standard set built through multi-annotator consensus and expert clinical review, then used a perturbation model to rewrite them into plausible but wrong answers anchored to the same patient's history. The author compared the method to mutation testing in software.[22] A clean run measures the false positive rate and a perturbed run measures the detection rate; the team settled on perturbing about 30 percent of the questions on each form.[22] In one example, changing a diagnosis from Crohn's disease to ulcerative colitis also led the judge to flag an unchanged answer listing strictures and fistulas, which point to Crohn's disease, a cross-answer consistency check the team had not explicitly designed.[22]
Pharmacy selection agent
A September 2026 post by Anirudh Jain traced five versions of the company's pharmacy-selection system over two years. Choosing a pharmacy is hard because specialty-pharmacy networks change without notice, insurance data is often incomplete, and a patient's preference may be buried in a patient text, a doctor's note or a prior authorization approval letter.[23]
| Version | Approach | Limitation described |
|---|---|---|
| V1 | Rules engine: a 14-case cascade for retail drugs and about 30 hard-coded insurance rules for specialty drugs | Rules went stale within weeks as pharmacy networks changed[23] |
| V2 | XGBoost model on 9 static features, with per-pharmacy confidence thresholds targeting more than 97% accuracy on automated selections | Drifted when a payer's network changed[23] |
| V3 | XGBoost scoring of past routing outcomes, weighted by recency and matched on every combination of at least two available features | Missed information held in documents and messages[23] |
| V4 | Large language model extractors reading prior authorization approval letters, doctors' notes and patient texts ahead of the ML models | A fixed priority order could not judge which conflicting signal was stale[23] |
| V5 | An agent with tools to search pharmacies, read documents including insurance cards, check dispensing restrictions, request patient preferences, schedule phone calls or escalate to an expert | First version performed worse than the rules cascade in many cases[23] |
The company measures this system by re-route rate, meaning how often a prescription has to be sent to a different pharmacy after the first choice.[23] Because it could not A/B test on live prescriptions, Forus ran the agent in "shadow mode", letting it work on real data while its actions wrote to non-production pathways, and compared its decisions with the rules engine for weeks before enabling an allowlist of specific actions and then unlocking more as the shadow data was validated.[23] The post said agents of this kind were running in production.[23]
Funding
| Round | Announced | Amount | Lead investor(s) | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Not disclosed | $7 million[11] | Not disclosed (Bain Capital Ventures says it invested from the seed round[20]) | Not disclosed |
| Series A | 2024 (not announced at the time[2]) | $30 million[14][16] | Thrive Capital and General Catalyst[14] | Not disclosed |
| Series B | May 12, 2026 | $123 million per AlleyWatch[17]; company announced $160 million raised[1] | Not stated; Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that Accel was leading a $100 million round[10] | $1 billion, per the company[2] |
| Series C | September 8, 2026 | $150 million[3] | Bain Capital Ventures[3] | $3 billion[3] |
Other investors named by the company include Redpoint, BoxGroup and Pear VC (May 2026) and Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures and SV Angel (September 2026).[1][3] Reported valuations are the company's figures; the sources do not say whether they are pre-money or post-money.
People
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Sahir Jaggi | Founder and chief executive[3] |
| Adam Harris, MD | Head of clinical intelligence; a practicing physician[15] |
| Isabel Chien | Member of technical staff; author of the company's LLM-judge evaluation post[22] |
| Anirudh Jain | Member of technical staff; author of the company's pharmacy-selection post[23] |
The company says its full team works out of a dedicated building in SoHo, New York.[6]
Reception and market context
Investors quoted in coverage stressed the size of the access problem and the company's growth. Thrive Capital partner Kareem Zaki told Forbes: "The most common experience patients have is getting a prescription. But despite how common it is, it is prohibitory for patients to get the medications they think they need." General Catalyst partner Chris Bischoff said Forus solves "the last-mile problem".[2] Ken Frazier, a special advisor at General Catalyst and former chief executive of Merck, told Forbes that during his time at Merck patients did not fill some 35 percent of new prescriptions.[2] Bain Capital's Kevin Zhang told Bloomberg that Forus was "one of the fastest growing companies across the entire Bain Capital Ventures portfolio".[4]
Some coverage was more cautious. In January 2026, Tech Funding News noted that the company had not publicly shared metrics such as approval rates, reductions in time to therapy or system-wide adoption.[14] After the Series C, the same outlet wrote that whether Forus could keep tripling its valuation every few months would decide whether it became a category winner or "the next AI valuation that got ahead of itself".[24] Results cited in coverage are reported by customers and the company: Family Allergy & Asthma said it cut prior authorization turnaround from more than seven days to a median of 1.1 days, and DOCS Dermatology Group said 80 percent more patients were getting their medications after it adopted Forus.[13]
Forus is one of several startups applying AI to medication access. Bloomberg's report on the Series C pointed to Latent raising $80 million in March 2026 and Courier Health securing $50 million in April 2026.[4] Forbes described Latent Health as a San Francisco startup building AI agents for specialty-drug prior authorization, valued at about $600 million after its $80 million Series A according to a person familiar with the deal, and named Mandolin as another company building prior authorization software for specialty drugs.[9]
Debarghya Das's "The Ultimate Neolab List" includes Forus but classifies it as "Not a neolab", with the note "Applied healthcare workflow product with ~$50M revenue."[25]
See also
References
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12Forus. "Building the foundation for modern medicine". Forus Stories, May 12, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14 ^15 ^16Amy Feldman. "Billions In Prescriptions Go Unfilled. This Startup Is Using AI To Fix That.". Forbes, May 12, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10 ^11 ^12 ^13 ^14Forus. "Building the AI network for medicine" (Series C announcement). Forus Stories, September 8, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3Micah Barkley. "AI Health Company Forus Raises $150 Million at a $3 Billion Value". Bloomberg News, via Advisor Perspectives, September 8, 2026.
- ^1 ^2Tandem. "Accelerate access to medicine" (company and careers page). withtandem.com, archived November 11, 2024.
- ^1 ^2 ^3Forus. "Company" (company and careers page). forus.com, archived July 11, 2026.
- ^Forus Health. "Forus Health: AI-Powered Eye Care & Retinal Imaging Solutions". Company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
- ^Tandem Health. "Your AI assistant for every step of care". Company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
- ^1 ^2Rashi Shrivastava. "This $600 Million AI Startup Is Speeding Up Paperwork So Patients Get Drugs Faster". Forbes, March 18, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3PYMNTS. "Tandem Technology to Raise $100 Million for Prescription Automation". PYMNTS, January 26, 2026 (summarizing a Bloomberg News report).
- ^1 ^2Forbes. "Sahir Jaggi" (30 Under 30, Healthcare 2025 profile). Forbes, last updated January 1, 2025.
- ^1 ^2Tandem. "Cut through the red tape" (page for doctors). withtandem.com, archived February 26, 2024.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9Heather Landi. "Forus secures $150M series C to grow AI-powered medication access platform". Fierce Healthcare, September 8, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5Vignesh R. "Accel to lead $100M for healthcare AI Tandem at unicorn level". Tech Funding News, January 27, 2026.
- ^1 ^2Forus. "OpenEvidence and Forus partner to streamline evidence-based prescribing and prior authorizations". Forus Stories, April 2, 2026 (originally issued under the Tandem name).
- ^1 ^2HLTH. "Forus Raises $150M Series C, Reaching $3B Valuation". HLTH Insights, September 9, 2026.
- ^1 ^2AlleyWatch. "The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 5/14/2026". AlleyWatch, May 14, 2026.
- ^Forus. "Forus and American Gastroenterological Association announce strategic partnership to improve medication access for GI patients". Forus Stories, July 9, 2026.
- ^Heather Landi. "Health tech startup Forus inks partnership with GI medical society to improve medication access". Fierce Healthcare, July 9, 2026.
- ^1 ^2Marissa Plescia. "Forus Secures $150M Series C, Reaches $3B Valuation". MedCity News, September 8, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4Forus. "AI for Prior Authorizations & Medication Access Support" (homepage). forus.com, archived July 11, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8Isabel Chien. "How we evaluate our LLM judge: a perturbation-based approach". Forus Engineering Blog, June 16, 2026.
- ^1 ^2 ^3 ^4 ^5 ^6 ^7 ^8 ^9 ^10Anirudh Jain. "We built agents to solve the last mile problem: pharmacy selection". Forus Engineering Blog, September 24, 2026.
- ^Abhinaya Prabhu. "Forus raises $150M at $3B valuation as AI network targets every doctor's office". Tech Funding News, September 9, 2026.
- ^Debarghya Das. "The Ultimate Neolab List". debarghyadas.com, accessed October 27, 2026.
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Cite this page: AI Wiki. "Forus (company)." aiwiki.ai, updated 27 Oct 2026, fact-checked 27 Oct 2026. CC BY 4.0. https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/forus_ai