Clasp

A nurse signs an offer. So does her loan balance.

Somewhere in a hospital HR office this quarter, a new graduate is signing a job offer. Nothing unusual there. What is unusual is the second number on the page: not just a salary, but a promise to chip away at the student loans she spent four years accumulating. That promise is the whole business of Clasp.

Clasp is a Boston company that sells health systems something they have wanted for a decade and rarely gotten - clinicians who show up, and then stay. It does this by rewiring the oldest lever in employment: who pays for the training. Instead of recruiters chasing nurses and therapists after graduation with signing bonuses, Clasp gets employers to commit earlier and pay later, in the form of student loan repayment tied to how long someone stays.

It is, depending on your mood, either a clever piece of financial engineering or a quietly radical idea about who should be on the hook for the cost of becoming a clinician. Clasp would happily take either description.

An MBA student who grew up around doctors.

Tess Michaels started the company in 2018 while finishing her MBA at Harvard Business School. She had the resume you would expect of someone about to argue with an entire industry - Goldman Sachs, Vista Equity Partners, a University of Pennsylvania degree - and one thing you might not: a family full of physicians. She had watched, up close, how staffing gaps strain care teams and how a loan balance quietly shapes a clinician's whole career map.

The first version of the company was called Stride Funding, and it was closer to pure fintech - financing that paid off based on outcomes rather than fixed interest. The bet underneath it never changed: that the person who benefits from your training (your employer) should help pay for it. In 2024 the company rebranded to Clasp, a name meant to evoke two hands holding on, and pointed the whole machine at healthcare.

Michaels has collected the usual founder hardware along the way - Forbes 30 Under 30, an MIT FinTech competition grand prize - but the more telling detail is that she keeps describing the recruitment system as "broken." Founders who succeed at this tend to be the ones who are genuinely annoyed.

Loan-linked hiring, explained without the jargon.

Here is the mechanism. An employer commits to a student before graduation. The student agrees to a multi-year work commitment. In return, the employer repays some or all of that student's loans over the years they stay. Clasp is the platform that matches the two, manages the loan-repayment plumbing, and keeps the whole arrangement honest.

For a hospital, the math is almost suspiciously tidy: a steady pipeline of committed talent - nurses, physical and occupational therapists, radiologic technologists, respiratory therapists - without the signing bonuses, the contract-labor premiums, or the revolving door.

Make the employer pay for the training it needs.

Strip away the platform and the funding rounds, and Clasp is arguing for a different default. For decades, the cost of becoming a clinician has landed almost entirely on the clinician. Clasp wants to move part of that weight onto the institutions that depend on those clinicians showing up - and to make staying a financially rational decision rather than a moral one.

The backers reflect that double identity. Crosslink Capital and Digitalis Ventures lead on the venture side; SHRM and Strada Education bring the HR and education credibility. Impact investors show up because the model, if it works, reduces debt for the people doing some of society's least optional work.

Interviews & demos.