Tennr Lands $101M to Streamline Patient Referrals, Reaches $605M Valuation

The inefficiencies of the U.S. healthcare referral process became personal for Tennr cofounder Diego Baugh while he was in college. After being hospitalized for stomach issues, Baugh was referred to a specialist but weeks passed with no communication. He never got the appointment. A second hospitalization led to another referral and another six-week delay. It wasn’t until he was hospitalized a third time that he realized just how widespread and damaging the problem truly was.

That experience would later shape the foundation of Tennr, a health tech startup launched in 2021 by Baugh, Trey Holterman, and Tyler Johnson. The New York-based company was built to solve a deceptively simple but deeply systemic issue: referrals from primary care and urgent care to specialists are riddled with delays, denials, and data drop-offs.

Tennr’s mission to fix that has gained serious investor backing. Less than a year after closing a $37 million Series B, the company has now raised a $101 million Series C round, led by IVP, with participation from Google Ventures, Iconiq, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed. The new funding values Tennr at $605 million, making it one of the fastest-growing health tech startups in an increasingly AI-driven sector.

CEO Trey Holterman, who previously worked as a software engineer at Health IQ and Strava, credits the idea not just to Baugh’s referral nightmare, but also to his own mother, a family medicine physician who had long voiced frustration over the administrative chaos of the referral process. “I probably should’ve just listened to my mom sooner, which I think is a tale everybody knows,” Holterman said.