Garner Health, a New York-based health technology company, has closed a $100 million Series E funding round, bringing its valuation to $2.74 billion. The round was led by Index Ventures, with continued backing from Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, Founders Fund, Redpoint, Thrive, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures.

The company operates a platform that analyses healthcare claims data to identify physicians who consistently deliver better patient outcomes, then gives employers financial incentives to steer their staff towards those providers. When an employee chooses one of Garner's recommended doctors, the employer covers most or all of their out-of-pocket costs. The company says employers using the platform see an average 12 per cent reduction in total annual healthcare spend in the first year, while employees pay on average 80 per cent less in out-of-pocket costs when seeing top-rated providers.

Garner currently serves close to 800 corporate clients, including USA Today, Paylocity, and the University of Oklahoma. Its gross annual recurring revenue stands at approximately $200 million and has more than doubled each year for the past five years.

The underlying problem Garner is addressing is well-documented. The US healthcare system pays providers based on volume of activity rather than patient outcomes, and patients have historically had little reliable data to help them choose between doctors. Garner's platform draws on a database covering more than 60 billion medical records from 320 million patients, cross-referenced against over 550 proprietary clinical metrics, to produce assessments of physician quality at a national scale.

Two AI-driven tools sit at the centre of the company's current product development. The first, the Garner Research Agent, is designed to review medical literature automatically and translate clinical findings into algorithms that assess doctor performance. The intent is to keep the company's quality metrics current with evolving medical evidence without requiring manual updating at scale. The second, the Garner Assistant, is a consumer-facing tool that helps members find doctors, check appointment availability, review claims, and understand their benefit entitlements.

Nick Reber, Garner's chief executive, said the company's model is built on the premise that giving patients better information and aligning financial incentives around quality will produce system-wide change. Jahanvi Sardana, a partner at Index Ventures, said AI had made it possible to measure physician quality in a way that had not previously been achievable, and that Garner had built the mechanism through which employers, hospitals, and patients could act on that information.

Archer-Daniels-Midland, the agricultural commodities company with more than 44,000 employees, is among Garner's clients. Molly Strader Fruit, ADM's vice-president of total rewards, said the partnership had helped reduce friction for employees navigating healthcare decisions, connecting them to high-quality providers within their benefit structure.

The new capital will go towards expanding the provider quality platform, further AI product development, and growth in membership. Garner has also recently signed partnerships with healthcare providers including Mercy, Atlantic Health, Teladoc, and Marathon Health. These arrangements are oriented around a different use case: helping health systems and clinical practices identify high-performing specialists for referrals and improve their own clinical standards using Garner's data.

That providers are now buying into the same data infrastructure that was originally designed to hold them accountable is a notable shift. It suggests the market for physician quality measurement is moving beyond the employer benefits sector and into the operational decisions of health systems themselves.

Garner says more than 46 per cent of eligible members actively use the platform, a figure the company regards as evidence that financial incentives are sufficient to change patient behaviour at scale. Whether that translates into measurable long-term health outcomes, rather than cost savings alone, remains an open question as the company enters its next phase of growth.

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