Tennr Inc., a healthcare startup focused on document intelligence, today announced that it has closed a $37 million funding round.

The Series B investment was led by Lightspeed Ventures and featured participation from a16z and Foundation Capital. This brings the total amount raised by Tennr to over $61 million, just six months after raising $18 million in a Series A funding round.

Tennr uses artificial intelligence document analysis tools to help healthcare organizations manage the thousands of paper documents they have to work with every day. Its software helps automate tedious and labor-intensive tasks associated with medical documents, including referral forms, patient records, insurance claims, and more.

By shouldering this burden, Tennr says healthcare organizations have more time to focus on providing care to their patients, so they can reduce wait times, care for more patients and improve outcomes.

Tennr’s software offers AI-driven document analysis and workflow automation capabilities that have been customized for the medical industry. While most major language models are more general and designed for use across all types of industries, Tenner’s LLMs were trained specifically on the types of documents found in the healthcare sector. For example, it can read, understand and categorize documents such as patient intake forms that often contain scribbled handwritten notes that are difficult for standard automation tools to parse.

Another advantage Tennr offers is that it can handle healthcare-specific challenges, such as forms with check boxes and multi-patient records. The startup says existing AI models often fail when trying to perform some of these tasks. Not so with Tennr, which created a “multi-patient” model that can identify which parts of long documents relate to specific patients, to reduce the time it takes to process forms while improving accuracy. .

Tennr also developed a bespoke checkbox reader model, which was trained on one of the largest datasets of labeled checkboxes in the world.

In addition to reducing document processing times, Tennr says it also helps eliminate potential errors in the process. As an example, its AI-powered insurance application review tool is able to flag missing data or incorrect entries in documents before they are sent to the insurance provider. This helps reduce the frequency of claim denials, it says.

Because it automates much of the paperwork that healthcare providers need to do, Tennr says organizations will need fewer administrative staff, so workers can be assigned to higher-value tasks.

Total Medical Supply LLC, a provider of diabetic medical supplies, believes Tennr’s platform helps it achieve better patient outcomes. Darius Reid, operations manager at Total Medical Supply, said the platform has become “transformative” for the company’s workflow. “We are now treating new patients in a fraction of the time it used to take us,” he said.

With the money from today’s funding round, Tennr aims to expand its engineering, research and development teams to refine its AI models and strengthen its market presence. The startup believes it can tap into a huge target market, as the vast majority of healthcare organizations still use manual processes for document management. By the end of next year, Tennr expects to be able to facilitate document management for up to 10% of all patients in the U.S. healthcare system.

“We see a real opportunity to step on the gas and be as aggressive as possible,” said Trey Holterman, co-founder and CEO of Tennr. “Tennr plans to double its workforce over the next six to eight months and has embarked on new projects to improve its technology in areas such as health code processing.”

The startup has attracted the interest of two of Silicon Valley’s most renowned venture capital firms, Lightspeed Ventures and a16z, and they both see huge potential in what the startup is doing.

“Tennr’s product addresses an important market need in the healthcare industry,” said Lightspeed’s Alex Kayyal. “Its workflow automation platform generates significant ROI for customers while significantly improving the patient experience. »

Image: Tennr