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How Tennr Secured Back-to-Back Rounds in One Year
YC Fast Growing Company Base Vol.01
eric gu
April 16, 2025
Series Intro
YC Fast Growing Company Base is dedicated to tracking rapidly growing companies from Y Combinator, documenting their development journeys, breakthrough moments, and challenges. We explore the untold stories behind these successful startups, analyzing their path from initial ideas to billion-dollar valuations.
TL;DR
1. Founded in 2021 by three Stanford Alumni; Part of YC W23
2. Raised back-to-back funding round in 2024 back by Lightspeed, a16z and Foundation; Valued at $200M+ with $3~5M ARR (Series B)
3. Pivot from general solution to vertical solution → Tackle administrative work in healthcare
Tennr Fundraising History
Path of Growth: From General to Vertical
A General Start in the early stage of Gen-AI App Wave
During YC W23 batch, Tennr was building custom LLMs for companies based their industry knowledge base. Tennr trained models for each of their customers, using specific company documents and a secure proprietary training engine to answer nuanced questions instantly and generate reports briefings.
First Focus
In May 2023, Tennr was still iterating on product and didn’t have any revenue. Eight months later, Tennr surpassed $1M ARR. Tennr realized that not all customers were getting the same value by automating workflows(Gen-AI Upgraded RPA). Healthcare and Financial services did, so that’s where they focused. →Tennr became an automation platform for healthcare and financial services operations.
Healthcare Administrative Work Automation
💡 The first fax device was invented in 1843, yet nearly two hundred years later, faxes are a de facto communication method in the healthcare industry.
The healthcare industry often runs into complex data entry, pages upon pages of detailed clinical information, and constant back and forth between providers. Tennr’s proprietary VLM model RaeLM™ is trained on over 4 million medical documents, 230 million data fields, 8,000 page classifications, and 2 billion checkboxes.
Powered by RaeLM™, Tennr’s platform began by streamlining patient referral tracking and has since become a key link in the healthcare administrative workflow. The results speak for themselves: cutting pre-visit patient processing periods from weeks to hours, lowering front-end billing errors by 98%, and reducing insurance claim denials for providers.
Why They Invest?
Looking more broadly, there’s a sea change on the horizon in the RPA space and of applying AI to verticals. The combination of new technology and rote processes are leading to the emergence of new possibilities.
Watching advancements in LLMs and AI reasoning unfold over the last few years, we think there is about to be an enormous unlock in what’s possible with automation. There’s a vast subset of currently manual tasks that computers can’t perform because that data is unstructured, or the steps involve just enough ambiguity that human reasoning and judgment is required.
We believe the winners in agentic automation will be vertical-specific, provide end-to-end solutions, be able to write instead of just read and work well with unstructured data. Tennr is pioneering what this new class of software will look like.