Doctor's hiring platform makes hospitals apply to nurses

Iman Abuzeid finished medical school in London and declined to take up a residency. Her father was disappointed.

She had not lost interest in healthcare. She had decided that treating patients one at a time was too small a lever.

"Working as a doctor is great, but you're only working with one patient at a time," she told Crunchbase News. With software, "you have millions of users using your products."

Abuzeid was born in Saudi Arabia to a Sudanese family, moved to London at 18 and emigrated to New York at 24. She advised healthcare clients at Booz Allen and McKinsey, took an MBA at Wharton, and moved to San Francisco in 2013 to work as a product manager at an early-stage health tech company.

There she met Rome Portlock, an MIT-trained engineer. She still does not write code. He has run engineering and data at their company since the start.

The idea came from two complaints that did not fit together. Doctors she knew described chronic understaffing. Nurses in Portlock's family described applying for jobs and hearing nothing back.

"We started to dig into it more, and we were like, 'This doesn't make any sense,'" she recalls. The founders concluded that hospital recruiting teams were small, buried in applications and working manually.

Incredible Health, founded in 2017 and based in San Francisco, turns the process round. Employers apply to the healthcare professionals, and the software handles screening and matching for permanent roles at hospitals, surgery centres and home health organisations.

The platform is free for nurses. Employers pay an annual subscription. The company names Kaiser Permanente, Tenet Health, Trinity Health, NewYork-Presbyterian and Johns Hopkins among its customers, and says its products are used by 1.5 million healthcare professionals — one in two American nurses — and 1,500 employers.

The fundraising was less tidy than the customer list suggests. Abuzeid says she spoke to roughly 70 investors for the seed round and eight put in money, among them Obvious Ventures and Precursor Ventures. The company has since raised about $97.5m in total, with Andreessen Horowitz, Base10 Partners and NFX also on the register.

Every round was oversubscribed, she says, which she attributes to raising from strength: the business generally runs close to cash-flow break-even and has at times been cash-flow positive.

She is also picky about whose money she takes, preferring firms with marketplace experience and partners who have already backed women or founders of colour. "I don't want to be the first," she said. "I'm not here to overcome someone's bias. That's not a good use of my time."

In 2025 the company added two AI agents, built alongside health systems including Baylor Scott & White Health, Sutter Health and Johns Hopkins. One, called Lyn, runs the first recruiter interview, asks clinical and behavioural questions and hands the candidate on to a hiring manager. A second, Gail, helps nurses write CVs and rehearse interviews.

Abuzeid says Lyn has cut hiring time by 30%. Three-quarters of interviews now happen within 24 hours of an application, against up to two weeks before, and about 40% take place at night or at the weekend, when recruiters are not at their desks.

The operational point travels beyond nursing. The bottleneck was never candidate supply; it was a small team processing applications by hand, and the fix was to remove the queue rather than fill it faster. Founders selling into any understaffed sector might check whether their customer's problem is demand at all.