There’s disruption, and then there’s what BetterRX is doing in hospice pharmacy, rewiring the circuitry of a system so bloated with PBMs and rebate gymnastics it forgot who the medication was actually for.
Let’s rewind. Jared Stong, PharmD, wasn’t dreaming up SaaS slides in a co-working space. He was in the trenches, an actual hospice pharmacist watching patients suffer because meds got stuck in middleman limbo. One of those patients? His father-in-law. That wasn’t a product-market fit moment. That was a personal line in the sand.
So in 2007, Stong built closed-door pharmacies. Not for scale. For speed. Then in 2016, he started coding. By 2021, Connected RX (CRX) hit the market, a hospice-specific platform built for clarity, compliance, and care that doesn’t wait for approvals from a PBM hotline. And now, in 2025, BetterRX just landed its first institutional round, an undisclosed strategic growth investment from BVP Forge, the growth arm of Bessemer Venture Partners.
This isn’t your average funding announcement. This is the moment a founder-led, 6.4-million-e-prescriptions-deep, 345,000-patient-strong company shifts from bootstrapped brilliance to national scale, with help from a firm that doesn’t waste time with tourists.
Leading the charge? Tim Tannert, former SoftWriters CEO and a long-term care pharmacy operator who actually knows how to turn complexity into clean execution. Backed by a team that includes Peter Galbraith (CTO), Eric Hemming (COO), Randi Letendre (CFO), and Ben Clarke, who spent the last decade scaling BetterRX as CEO and now remains on the board.
And let’s be real, the numbers slap. $5.7 million in 2024 revenue. 134% three-year growth. 90+ NPS. Nurses are saving five to six hours a week. 94% of surveyed pharmacies prefer it to legacy PBMs. Not because it’s flashy. Because it works.
No markups. No rebates. No captive mail-order. Just BetterAI, 244,000 clinical algorithms pushing real-time drug cost optimization through HIPAA-compliant, AWS-secure infrastructure. All routed through a pharmacy-agnostic model that taps into a 90,000-strong national network. If the old system was a maze, BetterRX is a straight line.
This round fuels more than growth, it fuels a mission: end medication-related suffering in hospice care. And with ForgeEdge now in play, expect the hiring pace to pick up across engineering, clinical support, and GTM. Predictive analytics, deeper EMR integrations, and mobile expansions are already on the product roadmap.
This isn’t some tech-for-good fluff piece. This is a fully operational, AI-enhanced, PBM-free platform scaling into a $7 billion market with 1.7 million annual patients and nearly 4,700 certified agencies looking for clarity and control.
Startups, Startup Funding, Venture Capital, Pharma, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare, Health Tech, Deep Tech, Compliance, Infrastructure, Technology, Innovation, Tech Ecosystem, Startup Ecosystem, Hiring, Tech Hiring.
If software engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.
