TriFetch raises USD $1.9 million to automate clinic admin

TriFetch has raised USD $1.9 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by Nexus Venture Partners.

The San Francisco healthcare technology startup will use the funding to expand its automation platform for administrative work in independent specialty clinics. The system focuses on patient calls and scheduling, referral processing, and prior authorisations.

TriFetch is also emerging from stealth with active pilot programmes in clinics across California. Those deployments are intended to reduce the burden on clinic staff handling high volumes of phone enquiries, paperwork, and insurer approvals.

Independent specialty clinics often face the same administrative demands as larger health systems, but with fewer staff and tighter budgets. In that environment, prior authorisations can consume much of the working day, while referral coordination and unanswered patient calls add to delays.

Its software is designed to fit into existing clinic systems rather than require a migration to a new electronic health record platform. The product works across established systems including NextGen, eClinicalWorks, and Athena.

TriFetch was founded by Varuni Sarwal and Rosemary He, who met while completing PhDs in computer science at UCLA. Their academic work focused on artificial intelligence in healthcare, including machine learning models for electronic health records and computer vision tools for medical imaging.

The founders said their research experience highlighted a gap between progress in AI and the day-to-day reality in many clinics, where manual paperwork, fax machines, and telephone-heavy processes remain common. That led them to build software around routine but labour-intensive tasks that often consume front-office and back-office teams.

"Clinics are doing everything they can to keep up, but the administrative workload keeps expanding," said Varuni Sarwal, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of TriFetch. "We built TriFetch to plug into how clinics already run and take the tasks staff dread most off their plate - calls, referrals, and prior auth - so teams can focus on the parts of care that require the human touch."

The platform includes a multilingual voice agent for inbound and outbound patient calls, a referral engine that routes and processes referrals and verifies eligibility, and software that submits and tracks prior authorisation requests. Clinics can keep humans involved in the process while reducing the time staff spend on repetitive administration.

"Clinics don't need more software where every new tool adds another tab, another login, another thing to learn; they need less friction. TriFetch integrates as the connective tissue of a clinic's existing operations, adapting to the clinic's ecosystem and not the other way around," said He.

Pilot results

TriFetch outlined several examples from clinics already using the software in pilot settings. In an ophthalmology practice, staff had struggled with high volumes of phone calls and prior authorisations while trying to maintain care standards. In a cardiology clinic, teams had been stretched by patient enquiries and internal routing work.

The company gave more detail on a gastroenterology practice, where two employees were said to spend their full working day processing up to 100 referrals and calling patients to arrange appointments. TriFetch said its system now manages that workflow end to end, freeing about 16 staff hours a day and returning more than USD $200,000 a year to the clinic.

For a mid-sized specialty practice, the impact could range from USD $500,000 to USD $1.4 million a year in recovered costs and additional revenue, with administrative savings exceeding 50% in some cases, according to the company.

A clinician using the system described the operational pressure on practices. "Clinics up and down the US are facing the same administrative headache. Working with TriFetch, we've been able to relieve our staff from managing patient calls and scheduling, freeing them from hundreds of voicemails and phone calls to focus on the patients in front of them. AI can be incredibly powerful when adopted safely, and I can't think of a better team to trust with that in my clinic," said Dr Shashi Ganti, ophthalmologist at Cal Retina MD.

Backers and advisers

Alongside Nexus Venture Partners, the financing included angel investors with links to Google, Hippocratic, Mercor, and MIT. The backing gives TriFetch support from investors betting that administrative healthcare work remains a major opportunity for AI tools, particularly outside the largest hospital systems.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, partner at Nexus Venture Partners, set out the firm's view of the market. "Varuni and Rose are deep domain experts in healthcare AI. Healthcare administrative workflows represent one of the largest untapped opportunities for AI, and the TriFetch team is uniquely positioned to unlock it. They combine deep AI capabilities with real-world clinical understanding to build what we believe can become a category-defining company in healthcare AI. We are excited to partner with TriFetch and support them on this journey."

TriFetch is also working with a group of more than 10 advisers drawn from health system operators and executives, including former NextGen Co-founder Tim Eggena and leaders from Sutter Health, Johns Hopkins, Mayo, UW Health, Revere Health, Springfield Clinic, and UChicago Medicine. The group reflects an effort to shape the product with input from people who have managed the workflows it is trying to automate.