He sends a clinician to draw the line, hang the infusion, and run the transfusion at a patient's bedside - so the ambulance never gets called.
Tyler Payne. The molecular biologist turned operator who decided the most valuable thing in post-acute care was a nurse who can find a vein.
Tyler Payne runs Vellum Health, an Austin company built on a plain observation: a lot of hospital visits happen because nobody could get an IV into a vein at the bedside.
Vellum sends trained clinicians to skilled nursing facilities, long-term acute care centers, and homes to place peripheral lines, midlines, and PICCs; to run on-demand infusions for hydration, infection, and nutrition; and to perform on-site blood transfusions. The pitch is not a moonshot. It is a nurse with a mobile kit, showing up before a transfer order gets written.
Underneath the clinical work sits software. Vellum's AI platform reads a facility's EMR and surfaces the patients who need vascular access, handles documentation, and routes care between providers and payers. Payne calls it the connective tissue. The company describes its own goal as "meeting patients where they are - and the healthcare ecosystem where it wants to be."
That second half of the sentence is the interesting one. Meeting patients where they are is a nice thing to say. Meeting the healthcare ecosystem where it wants to be is a claim about incentives - about the fact that hospitals, payers, and post-acute facilities would all quietly prefer that a patient not show up in an emergency department for something a nurse could have handled at the bedside. Vellum is built on the theory that everyone in that chain is willing to pay for the version where the ambulance stays parked.
This funding marks a pivotal milestone for our company. It allows us to scale nationally while launching a brand that represents our commitment to smarter, value-driven care.
Most founders start with a blank page. Payne started with a fragmented market. Regional vascular-access businesses were already doing the work - placing lines, running infusions - in scattered pockets of the country, each with its own name, its own operations, its own book of facility relationships.
Vellum's move was to bring them together. Neva Mobile Vascular Access, PICC Performance, and Peak Mobile Vascular Access became parts of one brand and one platform. The consolidation is the product: a single technology layer, a single quality standard, and a single interface for hospitals, payers, and post-acute providers who otherwise have to coordinate all of that themselves.
There is a reason roll-ups happen in exactly this kind of market. The work is real, the demand is steady, and the operators are small - a local team of nurses who are very good at placing a line and less interested in building EMR integrations or negotiating national payer contracts. Buy several of those teams, keep the people doing the work, and add the layer they were never going to build themselves, and you get something that looks less like a services business and more like a platform. The clinicians still put the line in. What changes is everything around the line: how the patient was found, how the visit was documented, how it got paid.
The risk of that strategy is the risk of every roll-up - that the whole is just the parts, stapled together, and the promised connective tissue never quite connects. Vellum's answer is the software. If the AI genuinely finds patients earlier and the documentation genuinely writes itself, the combined company is worth more than the sum of the businesses it absorbed. If it doesn't, it is three regional nurse staffing operations with a shared logo. The Series A is, in part, an investor bet on which of those two it becomes.
// Regional vascular-access businesses folded into the Vellum brand
PIVs, midlines, and PICCs placed at the bedside in skilled nursing facilities, LTACs, and homes - no transfer required.
Infusions for hydration, infection, cognition, and nutrition, plus on-site blood transfusions delivered mobile.
Secure EMR integration that surfaces patients needing care, drafts documentation, and routes between providers and payers.
Payne studied molecular biology at the University of Colorado Boulder - the science of what happens inside a cell - before moving to the very physical business of what happens inside a vein. He later earned an MBA from UT Austin's McCombs School of Business.
His operating years were in clinical research. At ePatientFinder and Elligo Health Research he worked on connecting patients to trials. Then, as an early member of CVS Health's Clinical Trial Services team, he led technology and product teams building the infrastructure to run trials nationwide. Vellum is the same instinct pointed at a different problem: use software to find the patients, then get the care to them.
Clinical trials are, at bottom, a patient-finding problem. The hard part of running a study is not the science; it is locating the specific humans who qualify and getting them into the process. Payne spent years building the machinery that does that at scale, first at a startup and then inside one of the largest pharmacies in the country. It is not a large leap from "find the patients who qualify for this trial" to "find the patients in this facility who need a line before they end up in an ambulance." The verbs are the same. Only the destination changed - from a research protocol to a bedside.
In mid-2025 Vellum closed a Series A led by FCA Venture Partners, with participation from Green Park & Golf Ventures and follow-on from the company's seed angels. Matt King, a managing partner at FCA, joined the investor group; seed backer Michael Sanderson participated as well.
The economic logic is the whole pitch. Every avoided ambulance ride and every prevented readmission is money that stays in the system. Vellum sells to the parties that carry that cost - hospitals, payers, and post-acute providers - and positions its AI as the layer that finds the opportunity before it becomes an emergency. The capital, Payne said, goes toward national scale and further investment in the platform.
It helps that Vellum is not asking anyone to believe a new thing is possible. Nurses have placed IV lines at bedsides forever; infusions and transfusions outside the hospital are established practice. What is being underwritten here is not a scientific bet but an operational and distribution one - can a single company do this consistently, in many places, and get reimbursed for it cleanly enough that the unit economics work. That is a less glamorous question than most healthcare pitches ask. It is also the kind of question that, when answered yes, tends to compound. The company launched the unified brand at the same moment it announced the round, which is the sort of thing a founder does when he wants the market to stop seeing a collection of local vendors and start seeing one national platform.
The broad story Vellum is attached to is one that hospital executives have been telling for a decade: that the future of patient-centered care shifts beyond the hospital walls, delivering the same outcomes at lower cost across the ecosystem. It is a comfortable thing to say in a keynote. It is a harder thing to actually staff, because "care outside the hospital" is not one product - it is a thousand small physical errands that someone has to show up and perform, in a facility, on a schedule, with the right supplies and the right credentials.
Payne's company exists in that gap between the slide and the errand. Vellum does not argue with the vision; it sells the logistics that make the vision real. A patient in a skilled nursing facility needs a midline placed on Tuesday. A long-term acute care center needs an infusion run without shipping the patient across town. Somebody has to answer those calls, and answer them the same way every time. That is unglamorous, repeatable work, and repeatable work is exactly the kind that rewards a platform with software underneath it and a national footprint on top.
What makes Payne worth watching is that he picked a problem sized to be solved rather than merely discussed. He is not promising to cure a disease or replace a physician. He is promising that the nurse will show up, the line will go in, the note will write itself, and the bill will be clean - and that if he does that reliably enough across enough facilities, the savings speak for themselves. In healthcare, where so many pitches ask you to believe in a distant future, that is a refreshingly near-term claim. The next few years, and the national expansion the Series A is meant to fund, are the test of whether it holds.
Tyler Payne is the founder and CEO of Vellum Health, an Austin-based company that sends clinicians to draw a line, hang an infusion, or run a blood transfusion at a patient's bedside in a skilled nursing facility or living room instead of an emergency room. He rolled up a set of regional vascular-access businesses, wrapped them in a single brand and an AI platform that reads a facility's EMR to find patients who need care, and closed a Series A in mid-2025 led by FCA Venture Partners. Before Vellum he helped build CVS Health's nationwide clinical-trial infrastructure and worked at Elligo Health Research and ePatientFinder. He holds a molecular biology degree from Colorado and an MBA from UT Austin's McCombs School.
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