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

The Series B investment was led by Lightspeed Ventures and saw participation from a16z and Foundation Capital. It brings Tennr’s total amount raised to more than $61 million, coming just six months after it raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding.

Tennr is using artificial intelligence document analysis tools to assist healthcare organizations in managing the thousands of paper documents they have to work with each day. Its software helps to automate the tedious and labor-intensive tasks associated with medical documents, including referral forms, patient records, insurance claims and so on.

By taking on this burden, Tennr says healthcare organizations have more time to focus on actually providing care to their patients, so they can reduce waiting times, handle more patients and improve outcomes.

Tennr’s software features AI-powered document parsing and workflow automation capabilities that have been customized for the medical industry. Whereas most large language models are more general-purpose, designed to be used in every kind of industry, Tenner’s LLMs were trained specifically on the kinds of documents found within the healthcare industry. For instance, it can read, understand and categorize documents like patient intake forms that often contain scrawled, handwritten notes that are difficult for standard automation tools to parse.

Another advantage Tennr provides is that it can handle healthcare-specific challenges, such as forms with checkboxes and multi-patient records. The startup says existing AI models often fall short when trying to perform some of these tasks. Not so with Tennr, which has created a “multi-patient” model that’s able to identify which parts of lengthy documents pertain to specific patients, so as to reduce the time required to process forms, while improving accuracy.

Tennr has also developed a custom-built checkbox reader model, which was trained on one of the world’s largest datasets of labeled checkboxes.

Besides reducing document processing times, Tennr says it also helps to 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’re sent to the insurance provider. This helps to reduce the frequency of claim denials, it said.

Because it automates a large chunk of the paperwork that healthcare providers have 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 to drive better outcomes for patients. Darius Reid, head of operations at Total Medical Supply, said the platform has become “transformative” to the company’s workflow. “We’re now processing new patients in a fraction of the time it used to take,” he explained.

With the money from today’s round, Tennr wants to expand its engineering and research and development teams in order to refine its AI models and boost 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 thinks it will be in a position 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 to be as aggressive as possible,” said Tennr co-founder and Chief Executive Trey Holterman. “Tennr is planning to double its employee numbers over the next six to eight months and has embarked on new projects to improve its technology in areas such as processing healthcare codes.”

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

“Tennr’s product is meeting a significant market need across the healthcare industry,” said Lightspeed’s Alex Kayyal. “Its workflow automation platform drives significant ROI for customers while improving the patient experience dramatically.”

Image: Tennr