About Us

Transcendent Endeavors was founded in 2001 by Bill Tan in New York City. As a fluent speaker of English and several Chinese dialects, Bill accompanied his family to healthcare facilities and acted as their interpreter. He witnessed up close the adverse impact that lack of language assistance can have on patients and their family members, as well as the frustration that healthcare providers experience when they are unable to provide adequate care to patients. He looked into the various methods by which language assistance was provided and realized that there was a near complete absence of technology-enabled solutions for addressing language barriers. He decided that, by bringing together a team of motivated individuals with an array of expertise, innovative solutions could be developed to address communication barriers. Bill made a commitment to pursuing this vision, and Transcendent Endeavors was born. The selection of the company’s name embodies its vision – enabling people to transcend communication barriers, attain new possibilities and improve their quality of life.

Since its inception, Transcendent Endeavors has received a number of National Institutes of Health (NIH) innovation research grant awards. One of its early successes, the Starling Bedside Communication System, was a multilingual patient-nurse messaging platform that optimized nurse workflow and was later acquired by a publicly traded healthcare company for national rollout. The Canopy suite of products includes the #1 most widely used bilingual medical Spanish e-learning system and an array of tools for eliminating the language barrier. The company’s newest ventures include supporting patient adherence with the use of incentives through Aqueduct, and promoting early childhood bilingual literacy – and the joy and parent-child co-reading – through BLoSSoM.