For millions of patients and providers, healthcare referrals are a frustrating constant: slow, hard to track, and tangled in outdated systems. Every year more than one-third of Americans are referred to specialists, yet the process remains stuck in a patchwork of faxes, emails and portals. The impact is predictable: delayed care, overwhelmed staff and missed revenue.
Tennr is working to rewrite this narrative with a category-defining approach to referral automation. We, at ICONIQ, are thrilled to partner with Tennr in its Series C funding round, as they strive to bring precision, transparency and efficiency to referral management. The platform, powered by a proprietary AI model, does more than streamline operations, it unlocks time, visibility, and care for patients and providers alike.
At the core of Tennr is RaeLM, the first self-learning vision-language model trained on millions of healthcare documents. Tennr reads, extracts, and acts on referral data in various formats with speed and accuracy.
What struck us most in our early conversations with the Tennr team was not just the strength of their technical foundation, but the depth of their personal experiences that shaped Tennr’s mission. Co-founders Trey Holterman, Diego Baugh, and Tyler Johnson launched Tennr out of the Stanford AI Lab with a clear goal: to ensure no patient falls through the cracks. Trey spent years watching his mom wrestle with broken referral workflows in family medicine. Diego experienced the chaos firsthand as a patient. And together, with Tyler’s expert engineering leadership, they set out to bring world-class technical depth to a corner of healthcare that had long been overlooked and underserved.
We spoke with several Tennr customers, ranging from specialist physician groups to DME suppliers, imaging centers and beyond, who shared their love for Tennr. Customers commented that it increases throughput, reduces denials, saves time and drives measurable ROI. At NEB Medical, intake processing time dropped by over 60 percent, enabling teams to triple daily capacity. Eastern MedTech scaled document handling eightfold without adding headcount.
Tennr is looking to make a broader impact that goes well beyond operations. At the heart of Tennr’s mission is bringing real-time visibility to the patient journey.
Take, for example, a patient referred by their primary care doctor for infusion therapy. If that referral is delayed or lost in the shuffle due to administrative gaps, the consequences can be serious: care is postponed, conditions worsen, and patients are left to navigate the system on their own or fall out of it entirely.
Tennr’s newest launch, the Tennr Network, is designed to change this by transforming referrals into a transparent, collaborative journey. By connecting referring providers, receiving providers, and patients, Tennr gives all parties shared, real-time visibility into referral status. The referral is no longer a black hole. It’s trackable, responsive, and easy to follow.
We believe the Tennr team has demonstrated a deep understanding of healthcare’s complexities and an impressive ability to build robust technology tailored precisely to those pain points. As Tennr continues to work on redefining patient processes for referral-based care, we look forward to supporting their mission to ensure no patient is left waiting unnecessarily and no provider is burdened by avoidable administrative hurdles.
Congratulations to Trey, Diego, Tyler, and the entire team on this next chapter. We are excited for what’s ahead in your journey and grateful to be a part of it!
Welcome, Tennr to the ICONIQ family—here’s to bringing a more transparent and efficient healthcare experience in a digital world.
Published:
June 18, 2025
