Referral-based healthcare. The phrase alone sounds like a bureaucratic scavenger hunt where the prize is waiting six weeks for someone to tell you what your PCP already suspected. If you’ve ever been caught in that broken maze, or watched a family member navigate it with the grace of a bull in molasses, you know the system wasn’t designed for efficiency. It was designed because no one else dared to rebuild it. Until Tennr.
Tennr didn’t just pop up out of a WeWork with a slick logo and vague ideas about AI. This is a company with grit baked into its origin story. CEO Trey Holterman watched the system fail from the inside; his mom worked in family medicine. Co-founder and CPO Diego Baugh got the front-row seat when a referral nightmare nearly turned into a personal medical crisis. Throw in CTO Tyler Johnson, and the three Stanford alums didn’t just study large language models; they lived inside the problem long enough to know where to hit it.
Fast-forward to now: Tennr just closed a $101M Series C round, led by IVP’s Zeya Yang. Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, GV, ICONIQ, Foundation Capital, and Frank Slootman (yes, that Frank Slootman) came back to double down. That’s not a funding round; it’s a declaration. It says the industry’s ready to break up with bad workflows and start something real with precision.
Tennr’s not building general-purpose tech hoping it finds a use case. They’ve got RaeLM, a vision language model built from the ground up for the way healthcare actually works. Trained on 4 million medical docs, 230 million data fields, 2 billion checkboxes, and more handwritten chaos than a CVS prescription pad, RaeLM doesn’t guess. It knows. And it’s running point on automating the slog of referrals, eligibility, scheduling, and billing like it’s been doing this since residency.
And they’re not playing small ball. This round fuels the launch of Tennr Network, a coordination layer stitching together referring providers, specialists, and patients with real-time transparency. Because if Uber can tell you your driver’s 3 minutes away, why should a patient wait 30 days to learn their referral went nowhere?
This isn’t about “disruption.” It’s about execution. Tennr cut referral times from 10 days to 10 minutes, hit an ARR in the eight figures, and processes 10 million documents a month. That’s not theory. That’s momentum.
