What happened
Forus, a New York-based health tech company formerly known as Tandem, announced on May 12, 2026 that it has raised more than $160 million, reaching a $1 billion valuation. The round was co-led by Thrive Capital and General Catalyst, with participation from Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, BoxGroup and Pear VC, according to the company's announcement and corroborating reports from Forbes and Accel's own investment post (Businesswire, 2026; Forbes, 2026; Accel, 2026).
Accel's investment post describes the deal as its Series B investment in the company, consistent with the size and investor mix of the round (Accel, 2026).
Forus builds software that sits inside physician workflows and automates the steps between a doctor's prescribing decision and a patient actually receiving the drug: insurance prior authorization, financial assistance enrollment, and pharmacy fulfillment routing. The company says the platform works across every drug, payer and pharmacy in the country and is offered at no cost to doctors and patients (Businesswire, 2026).
Who is affected
The immediate audience is physician practices and health systems already running prescriptions through manual back-office processes, work that typically involves fax machines, phone holds with insurers, and paperwork chases across separate pharmacy and payer systems. Forus says its user base has grown roughly tenfold year over year for the past two years, driven by word of mouth rather than paid marketing, and that the platform now operates in medical practices and health systems in all 50 states (Businesswire, 2026).
The company's founder and CEO, Sahir Jaggi, spent five years at Oscar Health before starting the company in 2023, an experience the company says shaped its view of where insurance markets, provider contracting and pharmacy benefit managers create friction for patients trying to fill a prescription (Pear Healthcare Playbook, 2026).
Ken Frazier, a special advisor at General Catalyst and former chief executive of Merck, is quoted in Forbes' coverage of the raise describing the scale of the problem the company is chasing: he said that while he led Merck, patients failed to take almost half of prescribed medications and never filled roughly 35% of new prescriptions at all (Forbes, 2026). Those figures are Frazier's own characterization of the adherence problem from his time at Merck, not an independently audited industry statistic, and are reported here only as his stated claim.
What Forus says the money is for
According to the company's announcement, the new funding will go toward expanding the platform's coverage across additional drug categories and payer relationships, and toward continuing to build out the automation that connects prescribing, authorization and fulfillment into a single workflow (Businesswire, 2026). The company has not disclosed a specific product roadmap or timeline beyond that.
Forus has not published third-party audited data on fill-rate improvements at practices using its software, and no such figures appear in the announcement or the coverage reviewed for this brief. Readers evaluating vendor claims about adherence or fill-rate outcomes should look for independently verified results rather than self-reported figures.
What happens next
Forus has not stated when it expects to reach profitability or announce its next funding round. The company's investor group, which now includes both Thrive Capital and General Catalyst as co-leads, suggests continued interest in administrative automation as a category within digital health, following a run of similar raises for prior-authorization and care-navigation platforms earlier in 2026, including Garner Health's $100 million Series E disclosed later in May (MedCity News, 2026).
Whether Forus's stated tenfold user growth converts into measurable reductions in prescription abandonment, an outcome the company implies but does not yet document publicly, is the detail worth watching as the platform scales into new markets.
Sources: Businesswire · Forbes · Accel · Pear Healthcare Playbook · MedCity News