Independent clinics have been patching these problems with more headcount for decades, even as labor costs rise due to a shortage of highly specialised workers and burnout deepens.

TriFetch was built to take that administrative weight off the clinic. By automating the three workflows that dominate clinic operating costs: patient calls, referral processing, and prior authorization, TriFetch helps clinics save on 50%+ of administrative costs while also increasing revenue.

This can translate into 1m+ savings for a mid-size practice.

Today, TriFetch announced a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from angels from Google, Hipprocratic, Mercor, MIT to scale its automation platform for the front, mid, and back office of specialty care.

The pressure TriFetch is targeting is structural. Independent clinics face the same administrative load as large health systems with a fraction of the staff.

A single prior authorization can take 45 minutes and referral coordination often means hours on hold. Patient calls pile up while the front desk triages between the waiting room and the phone line and those left unanswered go to an inbox with hundreds of unread messages.

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

TriFetch automates the three workflows that eat the most staff time. Its multilingual voice agent handles patient calls end to end – inbound inquiries, outbound scheduling, and follow-ups.

Its referral engine routes and processes referrals, verifies eligibility, and books patients with humans in the loop.

And its prior auth automation submits and tracks requests so paperwork delays never push costs onto patients. The platform plugs directly into how a clinic already runs, with no EHR migration or retraining required.

“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,” says co-founder and COO Rosemary He, who is leading the product team.

Cofounders Varuni Sarwal and Rosemary He met at UCLA while completing their PhDs in Computer Science, where they worked at the intersection of AI and healthcare. Varuni’s research applied machine learning to tabular EHR to predict depression and sepsis while Rosemary built computer vision models to predict Alzheimer’s progression in longitudinal 3D medical images.

After publishing in top venues like Nature and ICML, the contrast they saw  from the inside was hard to ignore: while AI was compounding at the frontier, most specialty clinics still ran on fax, phone trees, and manual paperwork.

They built TriFetch to bring that capability into specialty care, and have taken a forward-deployed approach, embedding alongside clinic teams until the system runs end-to-end.

TriFetch is currently running multiple active pilots with specialty clinics across California. In an ophthalmology clinic, the doctor and his staff are being overtaken by phone calls and prior authorizations while trying to deliver the highest quality of care to his patients. In a cardiology clinic, staff have been overwhelmed by patient inquiries and internal routing needs.

In a GI practice, two staff members work full-time processing up to 100 referrals a day and calling patients to schedule them.

TriFetch handles that workflow end-to-end, freeing roughly 16 hours of staff time a day and returning more than $200,000 a year to the clinic. For a mid-size specialty practice, that range of recovered costs and captured revenue can run anywhere from $500,000 to $1.4 million a year.

Dr. Shashi Ganti, Ophthalmologist, Cal Retina MD added:

“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 up 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.”

As AI adoption accelerates in healthcare, most tools either target large health systems, solve a single narrow workflow, or are EMR-specific.

TriFetch is the first unified, EMR-agnostic automation layer purpose-built for independent clinics that can be customized across specialties and locations, deploying alongside existing systems, NextGen, eCW, Athena, and others, in weeks, not quarters, reducing the need for clinics to stitch together multiple vendors to keep their operations running.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Partner at Nexus, commented:

“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.”

Calls, referrals, and prior authorization for specialty clinics are the starting point. Over time, TriFetch plans to build the first AI-native operating layer for healthcare systems, expanding nationwide from independent specialty clinics into multi-specialty groups, primary care, and hospital-owned networks, deepening EHR integrations, and connecting the tools clinics already use to the workflows that keep care moving. The goal: less time on paperwork, more time with patients.

TriFetch is guided by a founding cohort of 10+ strategic advisors drawn from operators inside the country’s leading health systems, including former NextGen co-founder Tim Eggena, senior leaders from Sutter Health, Johns Hopkins, Mayo, UW Health, Revere Health, Springfield Clinic, and UChicago Medicine.

The cohort reflects TriFetch’s operator-first approach: the people who have run the workflows TriFetch automates are the same people helping shape the product.

This grant program, which opened in February, provides up to $50,000 USD to higher education institutions committed to empowering students to advocate, champion, and develop solutions for inclusive digital financial systems.

The NextGen Higher Education Program aims to advance research, curriculum development, and hands-on training, equipping students and educators with expertise in open-payment technologies and digital finance while opening doors to emerging fintech career opportunities.

“Creating programs like this aligns with Interledger’s mission to expand access to digital financial services for the 1.4 billion people currently excluded from traditional banking,” said Chris Lawrence, chief program officer at the Interledger Foundation. “The NextGen Higher Education Program serves as a catalyst, empowering students to innovate and lead the development of inclusive digital financial systems.”

How to apply

• To apply, the Interledger Foundation is currently welcoming Letters of Intent (LOIs) from diverse higher education institutions ready to establish or expand programs that provide real-world experience in open-source practices, open-payment technologies, and digital financial systems.
• Higher education institutions that can apply include: public and private (two to four-year institutions), institutional systems or consortia of institutions and university-affiliated research centers or laboratories.
• Applying universities also must align the proposed initiative with their undergraduate or graduate departments of computer science, information technology, business, sustainable development, or related fields.

More information about the NextGen Higher Education program can be downloaded here:  2025 Grant Application Guidelines.

To be considered, educators need to submit a Letter of Intent(LOI) by 11:59 pm (ET) on October 3, 2025.

N.B.: Only LOI’s submitted on the submittable platform will be considered.

The forum took place ahead of World Teacher’s Day on Wednesday, 05 October themed: “The transformation of education begins with teachers.” 

The panel of influential education sector voices participating in the forum included:

• Simi Nwogugu: CEO at Junior Achievement Africa
• Brian Schreuder: Former Superintendent General at the Western Cape Education Department: Specialist Advisor
• Folawe Omikunle: Chief Executive at Teach for Nigeria
• Mayank Dhingra: HP’s Senior Education Business Leader for Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe

The discussion focused on a range of thought-provoking topics aimed to propel the discourse around the future of education forward.

Themes discussed included innovative technologies and pedagogies at the frontier of education in Africa; empowering educators to define new ways of learning for pupils; and digital equity: implementing digital transformation in the areas of teaching and effectively substituting the traditional learning confined to four walls.

Speaking during the #NextGen Educators Forum, Simi Nwogugu stated, “Educators need to understand that their traditional role as expert imparting knowledge has evolved to that of guide facilitating knowledge-acquisition, design thinking and critical reasoning skills in their students.

“To do this effectively, educators themselves need to be equipped with these and other emotional intelligence skills to be able to continually adapt to the needs of the students under their charge. Forums like this help steer all of us in the education sector in the right direction for how best to empower teachers to be more effective in the classroom.”

HP recently revealed the results of its first education-focused survey in Africa, which shed light on teachers’ skillsets and how the profession can be improved in South Africa and Nigeria.

Understanding the realities of 21st-century teaching, 10 skills were identified in the study as crucial to future proofing classrooms for educators. Across the board, teachers surveyed deemed these skillsets important, with 70% saying “soft skills” such as creative, innovative, critical, and entrepreneurial thinking, as well as digital literacy are very important.

Furthermore, one in three teachers say they could benefit from additional training to improve the above-mentioned skills and that the development would have an enormous impact on the pedagogy.

Omikunle says, “The only way African countries can reach their full potential is by investing in education. By investing in teachers, we are investing in our children’s futures, and inevitably that of our continent. We know there are numerous challenges educators face, and these discussions will help in providing African solutions to African challenges.”

Speaking on the impact brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, Schreuder noted that if anything the disruption of the pandemic proved about the sector, was that it is resilient. “We witnessed teachers implementing innovative strategies to keep learning at critical points of the schooling year. Armed with even better tools and relevant training, African teachers can transform this sector,” he says.

The world of education is evolving, and teaching must be transformed to better meet the needs of a digital learner. That is why HP launched its Innovation and Digital Education Academy (HP IDEA), which plays a critical role in bridging the skills gap and forms part of HP’s goal to accelerate digital equity for 150 million people by 2030.

This immersive teacher development programme is designed to enable educators to develop and access new learning modalities in select schools in South Africa, Nigeria, and other 15 markets across Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.

“The time to rethink and reshape the future of Africa’s education sector is now. The past few years have thrust the sector into dramatically new ways of learning. It has shown us that we need to empower teachers with the right tools to ensure that learners have the best chance at future-proof outcomes,” says Mayank Dhingra- HP’s Senior Education Business Leader for Africa, Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Not only that, but young people are a source of innovation and new ideas who have energy and talent.

He acknowledged the government’s commitment to putting young people at the centre of the national recovery plan, because of the county’s 64% unemployment rate.

In his address, President Ramaphosa stated, “It is the singular focus of this administration to ensure that young people are given access to opportunities so they can better themselves, that they can drive change in their communities, and contribute to our economy”.

However, it’s become evident that to effect real change, the private sector needs to step in and collaborate amongst industries to not only benefit the youth but ensure a talented future workforce.

One such collaboration is the ‘NextGen’ programme, a ServiceNow initiative with Quintica South Africa as its occasion partner aims to address the skills gap across the information technology (IT) sector by providing the opportunity for young people to train, reskill and upskill through its programme with the goal of recruiting local talent.

The ‘NextGen’ programme is a global programme that has been around for several years, but 2022 saw its first-ever group of African intakes. Of those that completed the programme, all have been able to either be promoted, find employment, or at the very least are now equipped with the skills that are in high demand – making them more “marketable” for recruiters and corporates who are hiring.

Quintica, a ServiceNow Elite partner, is helping companies unlock the platform by creating service experiences that drive customer loyalty and company-wide productivity, advancing their digital journey.

The ServiceNow Platform helps large enterprises run more efficiently – automating processes – by creating workflows for any part of the organisation, from legal to procurement, customer service to employee onboarding and even the IT departments.

When applications to the programme opened, there were over 300 African applicants and after a rigorous selection process, only five individuals were selected to take part in the programme.

Zimkhita Buwa, CEO and board member at Quintica South Africa, says “We are so proud of the first South African cohort, each with different backgrounds but shared experiences. These graduates have now been placed best to improve their futures and the future of those around them who rely on them for financial support. The opportunities to pursue their careers are now set on course through their identified and nurtured talents.”

All five of the participants have graduated from the programme and begin their respective new journeys by having addressed their personal skills gaps.

What President Ramaphosa said about youth which is particularly worth noting, is that “Young people are resilient and never give up, even when it is difficult.”

The ‘NextGen’ graduates have been great examples of resilience and tenacity.

According to Buwa, “We had a broad range of participants. Some had work experience, some were unemployed or retrenched and some just needed upskilling. The NextGen programme aims to change the lives of these graduates by giving them the skills they need to empower themselves and their future careers.” 

For Thulani Mhlwana, an IT and Computer Science graduate from Ekurhuleni, joining Quintica as an intern, gave him the opportunity to take the part in the ServiceNow NextGen programme – an opportunity he never thought was possible after being retrenched and unemployed. Graduating from the programme allows him to be part of a global platform that can take him anywhere in the world. 

“Quintica is like a family to me. Everyone welcomes you with a smile and open arms. I see a promising future ahead.” 

“It’s not just about on-the-job learning for me, it’s about personal, work and career development. I’ve taken myself out of my comfort zone and embraced opportunities that have a real business and broader industry impact.”  

Puseletso Nofemele worked nightshifts in a call centre to pay for textbooks to study IT and Finance and is an example of what many South Africans have to endure to land a job in the tough job market.

With such dedication and perseverance, Puseletso is now able to harness the skills learned through the NextGen programme and work towards a successful career in IT.

It’s been reported that South Africa has the highest share of female graduates in Sub-Saharan Africa at 32%, and even more female ICT graduates, at 38%.

This goes to show that concerted efforts are being made to narrow the gender gap in STEM education. 

It’s no wonder then, that three of the five African participants are female.

Like many other companies, ServiceNow has a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.

Muhammed Omar, country manager, Africa, ServiceNow, comments on the ServiceNow’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, “Our mission is to create unlimited opportunities for training and employment for populations that are traditionally marginalized from the field of technology – populations like Africa.  Our aim is to grow and develop the next generation of leaders by closing the technical skills gap and ensuring that all communities have access to education in technology.”

Just like Quintica’s tagline, ‘Big Things, Great People’, the ServiceNow NextGen programme is dedicated to growing the talent pool of ServiceNow-trained professionals – making the world of work, work better for all.