Tennr Raises $101 Million to End the Referral Care Black Hole in Healthcare
Tennr just pulled in a massive $101 million Series C round to take on one of healthcare’s most overlooked issues: the chaos of referral-based care. The round was led by IVP and backed by big names like Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, ICONIQ, and Frank Slootman. The company says it’s tripled revenue in just two quarters and already helps process millions of patients across hundreds of providers.
Every year, over a third of Americans are referred for specialty care, equipment, or imaging. But the handoff between providers is a mess—referrals come through faxes, emails, and e-portals, which often leads to delays, denials, or patients falling through the cracks completely. Tennr wants to fix all that without making overwhelmed providers change how they work.
“Patients really shouldn't vanish into a work queue,” said Tennr co-founder and CEO Trey Holterman, highlighting the significance of the announcement.
The company’s new product, Tennr Network, gives real-time visibility into referral status for everyone involved—referring doctors, specialists, and patients. Referring providers can track every patient they send out. Specialists know which referrals need follow-up. And patients finally get to see if their referral was accepted, when it’s scheduled, and what they’ll pay, like tracking an Uber or a food order.
Powering all this is Tennr’s homegrown orchestration platform and its proprietary language models, RaeLM, trained to process medical documentation and spot issues before they become denials. That’s what makes it stand apart from the one-size-fits-all approach of most AI tools.
Norco Inc.'s CIO Ty Barnett credited Tennr with removing hours of manual work every day and improving patient intake without the usual human error. The startup’s approach—no EMR overhauls, no provider retraining—has made it easier for systems to adopt.
The three founders, all Stanford engineers, built the company after personally witnessing how broken the system was. Holterman saw it firsthand through his mother, a family medicine physician. Baugh felt the pain himself when a long wait for a GI referral landed him in the ER.
Tennr’s promise: make healthcare more responsive without making providers change how they work. That’s not a small claim in a system where even a fax machine still matters.
