# Tennr

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/tennr
> Updated: 2026-06-08
> Categories: AI Companies, Healthcare AI
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

Tennr is an American [healthcare AI](/wiki/ai_in_healthcare) company that builds software to automate the patient referral and intake workflows that move people from one healthcare provider to another. Founded in 2021 and based in New York City, Tennr applies [document AI](/wiki/document_ai) to the fax-, form-, and paperwork-heavy "front office" of US healthcare: its system reads inbound referrals and clinical documents, extracts structured data, checks insurance eligibility and payer rules, and routes patients to care, with the goal of reducing manual data entry for provider organizations such as specialty practices, durable medical equipment (DME) suppliers, and diagnostics companies.[1][2] The company drew wide attention in June 2025 when it raised a $101 million Series C round at a $605 million valuation, led by the venture firm [IVP](/wiki/ivp).[1][3]

At the center of the product is a proprietary vision-language model the company calls RaeLM, which is trained specifically on medical documents rather than on general-purpose text. Tennr says the platform processes more than 10 million documents and hundreds of thousands of referrals each month for hundreds of healthcare providers.[1][4]

| Field | Detail |
|-------|--------|
| Type | Private company |
| Industry | Healthcare AI, health information technology |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Trey Holterman, Tyler Johnson, Diego Baugh |
| Headquarters | New York City, United States |
| Products | Tennr referral and intake automation platform; RaeLM document model; Tennr Network |
| Total funding | About $162 million (through 2025) |
| Valuation | $605 million (June 2025) |
| Key investors | IVP, [Andreessen Horowitz](/wiki/andreessen_horowitz), [Lightspeed Venture Partners](/wiki/lightspeed_venture_partners), GV, ICONIQ, Foundation Capital |

## Overview

Tennr sells software that automates "referral-based care," meaning the chain of administrative steps that begins when one provider sends a patient to another and ends when that patient is scheduled, cleared by insurance, and treated.[1][2] In US healthcare, much of this handoff still travels by fax, scanned PDF, email, and web portal, and the documents arrive as a mix of typed text, handwriting, checkboxes, and clinical notes that vary by sender. Staff at the receiving practice typically retype this information into an electronic health record, verify the patient's insurance, confirm that the order meets payer requirements, and decide where to route the case. Tennr positions its platform as a way to do that ingestion, eligibility checking, and routing automatically, so that, in the words of co-founder and chief executive Trey Holterman, the patient "actually gets the service" rather than getting lost in the handoff.[2]

Rather than trying to eliminate the fax machine, which remains entrenched in US healthcare, Tennr integrates with the fax and document tools that providers already use. It intercepts inbound digital faxes and other documents, reads them with its models, and feeds structured data into downstream systems.[5][6] The company describes the problem it addresses as the broader "pre-visit" patient-processing bottleneck, where referrals stall for days or weeks before a patient is scheduled.[2][4]

## Founding

Tennr was founded in 2021 by three engineers who met at [Stanford University](/wiki/stanford_university): Trey Holterman, who serves as chief executive officer; Tyler Johnson, the chief technology officer; and Diego Baugh, the chief product officer.[1][2] The three studied engineering and worked together on artificial intelligence and language-model research at Stanford before starting the company.[2]

The founders have said the idea grew out of personal experience with the referral system's failures. Holterman has described learning about the "black hole" of referrals from his mother, a family-medicine clinician who showed him how slow and chaotic the handoff between providers could be.[2][7] Baugh has recounted experiencing the problem as a patient, when weeks-long delays between gastroenterology appointments sent him to the emergency room while he was in college.[2] Early backing came through the startup accelerator Y Combinator, along with angel investors, before the company raised institutional venture capital.[5]

## Product

Tennr's platform automates the sequence of tasks involved in receiving and acting on a patient referral. According to the company and reporting on it, the system can:

- Ingest inbound referrals and clinical documents arriving by fax, email, or web portal, and read them regardless of whether the content is typed text, handwriting, or checkboxes.[2][4]
- Extract the relevant fields, such as patient demographics, ordering provider, diagnosis, and the requested service, and capture them as structured data.[1][4]
- Run insurance eligibility and benefits checks and apply payer policy and prior-authorization criteria, flagging cases likely to be denied.[1][3]
- Route patients to the appropriate next step, including scheduling and post-discharge handoffs for health systems.[3][4]

The technical core is RaeLM, a proprietary vision-language model. Tennr has described an early version as RaeLLM 7B, a roughly seven-billion-parameter model, and the company says later versions were trained on more than 100 million anonymized healthcare documents, about 2.3 billion distinct data fields, and over 8,000 sets of criteria.[3][4] Unlike a general-purpose large language model, RaeLM is tuned to interpret the nuanced and inconsistent data found in clinical notes, scanned forms, and checkboxes, and to evaluate documents against complex payer rules.[1][4] Tennr has built the model in part by fine-tuning open-source models, and the company emphasizes a specialized "checkbox reader" capability for the highly structured forms common in medical intake.[4][8] The platform is HIPAA compliant and de-identifies protected health information.[2]

In 2025, alongside its Series C round, Tennr introduced Tennr Network, a feature that gives referring providers, receiving providers, and patients real-time visibility into where a referral stands, in an effort to reduce the cases where patients disappear between two providers.[3][9] The company reports processing more than 10 million documents and hundreds of thousands of referrals per month, and says typical customer implementations take a few months.[4]

## Funding

Tennr raised capital across a seed round and three priced rounds between 2021 and 2025, with the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz an early and repeated backer before IVP led the largest round. Because some early figures are reported only approximately and individual round terms have at times been described inconsistently, the table below reflects the most consistently reported details.

| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Selected other investors |
|-------|------|--------|---------------|--------------------------|
| Seed | 2023 | Reported as a seed stage round | Y Combinator network | Angel investors |
| Series A | March 2024 | $18 million | Andreessen Horowitz | Foundation Capital, The New Normal Fund |
| Series B | October 2024 | $37 million | Lightspeed Venture Partners | Andreessen Horowitz, Foundation Capital |
| Series C | June 2025 | $101 million | IVP | Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, ICONIQ, Foundation Capital, Frank Slootman |

The $18 million Series A, announced in March 2024 and led by Andreessen Horowitz, brought the company's total funding to more than $25 million at the time.[5][6] In October 2024, Tennr raised a $37 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Andreessen Horowitz and Foundation Capital participating, taking total funding past $61 million.[8][10]

The June 18, 2025 Series C of $101 million was led by IVP and valued Tennr at $605 million.[1][3] Participating investors included returning backers Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed, new investors GV (Google Ventures), ICONIQ, and Foundation Capital, and Frank Slootman, the former chairman and chief executive of [Snowflake](/wiki/snowflake).[3][9] The round brought Tennr's total funding to about $162 million.[1][11] Tennr said its revenue had more than tripled in the two quarters since the Series B, reaching an "eight figure" annual run rate, though the company has not published precise revenue figures.[1][3]

The starting framing of this article had originally listed a third co-founder named "Tucker Holland"; that is incorrect, and the company's third co-founder is Tyler Johnson.

## Market and competition

Tennr operates in the broader market for AI-driven automation of healthcare administration, a segment that investors have pursued heavily as providers look to cut clerical labor without expanding staff. Its focus on the referral and intake workflow puts it alongside referral-management and front-office automation vendors such as ReferralMD, as well as a wider set of health information technology and revenue-cycle companies that automate document handling, eligibility checks, prior authorization, and claims, including firms like Notable Health, Adonis, Anterior, Synthpop, and others working on payer communication and intake.[12][13] Some industry coverage also situates Tennr near voice- and call-automation companies such as Infinitus that target adjacent administrative bottlenecks in healthcare.

Tennr's stated differentiator is its purpose-built document model and its decision to meet providers where their data already lives, in faxes and scanned forms, rather than requiring them to abandon legacy channels.[4][6] Its emphasis on high-volume, paperwork-intensive providers, including DME suppliers, diagnostics and imaging providers, and specialty practices, reflects a market where small back-office teams must process large volumes of referrals and where missed or delayed documents translate directly into lost patients and denied claims.[1][4] More broadly, the company is frequently cited as an example of applied AI for healthcare administrative automation, aimed at the long-standing problem of fax-heavy, manual referral processing in the US health system.[2][5]

## References

1. Cheng, Allie. "Exclusive: Health tech startup Tennr raises $101 million Series C at $605 million valuation to fix the patient referral process." Fortune, June 18, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/06/18/tennr-health-tech-ai-patient-referral-ivp-a16z-lightspeed-iconiq-series-c/
2. "Tennr clinches $101M to build out AI that automates patient referral process." Fierce Healthcare, June 2025. https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/health-tech/tennr-clinches-101m-build-out-ai-automates-patient-referral-workflows
3. "Healthcare referrals are where patients get lost. Tennr raises $101M to bring the visibility our system desperately needs." PR Newswire, June 18, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/healthcare-referrals-are-where-patients-get-lost-tennr-raises-101m-to-bring-the-visibility-our-system-desperately-needs-302485255.html
4. "Company Deep Dive: Tennr." Healthcare AI Guy. https://www.healthcareaiguy.com/p/company-deep-dive-tennr
5. "HealthTech startup Tennr raises $18M Series A funding led by a16z to fix fax machines for healthcare using AI." Tech Startups, March 26, 2024. https://techstartups.com/2024/03/26/healthtech-startup-tennr-raises-18m-series-a-funding-led-by-a16z-to-bring-back-fax-machines-to-healthcare-using-ai/
6. "Tennr Raises $18M to Fix Fax Problem in Healthcare with AI." HIT Consultant, March 26, 2024. https://hitconsultant.net/2024/03/26/tennr-raises-18m-to-fix-fax-problem-in-healthcare-with-ai/
7. "Revolutionizing Patient Referrals with AI: Our Partnership with Tennr." ICONIQ. https://www.iconiqcapital.com/growth/insights/revolutionizing-patient-referrals-with-ai-our-partnership-with-tennr
8. "Tennr Raises $37M to Automate Healthcare Documentation." HIT Consultant, October 22, 2024. https://hitconsultant.net/2024/10/22/tennr-raises-37m-to-automate-healthcare-documentation/
9. "Tennr Raises $101M to Transform Care Referrals." Slice of Healthcare, June 2025. https://www.sliceofhealthcare.com/p/tennr-raises-101m-to-transform-care-referrals
10. "Tennr raises $101M to automate referrals, hits $605M valuation." MobiHealthNews, June 2025. https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/tennr-raises-101m-automate-referrals-hits-605m-valuation
11. "Tennr Raises $101 Million in Series C." The SaaS News, June 2025. https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/tennr-raises-101-million-in-series-c/
12. "What's better than Tennr?" ReferralMD. https://referralmd.com/better-than-tennr/
13. "Top Tennr Alternatives, Competitors." CB Insights. https://www.cbinsights.com/company/tennr/alternatives-competitors