The puzzle sounded almost comic. In operating rooms and hospital corridors, physicians around Iman Abuzeid kept repeating one complaint: there were not enough nurses. In another family, the relatives of engineer Rome Portlock were saying something that should have made the first complaint impossible. They were experienced nurses. They wanted jobs. They could apply to ten or fifteen hospitals and wait months, often without hearing a word.
Two sides of a market were calling into the same void. Abuzeid and Portlock did not discover a shortage of résumés or hospital openings. They discovered a shortage of motion. The traditional hiring process had contrived to make the most sought-after workers do the pursuing, then rewarded their pursuit with paperwork and silence.
Their eventual answer, Incredible Health, was less a new job board than a change in stage direction. Hospitals would approach matched healthcare workers. The workers could accept or decline interview requests. The person in demand would be treated as though she were, in fact, in demand. It is the kind of idea that looks obvious once somebody has paid the price of noticing it.
An education in changing systems
Abuzeid was born in Riyadh to Sudanese parents. Her father was working there as a surgeon, and medicine was not an abstraction in the household. She went to University College London, earning degrees in international health and medicine. The expected next chapter would have involved a residency. Instead, she chose a wider operating theatre.
She moved to the United States in 2009 and worked on hospital strategy and operations. Consulting showed her how large institutions make decisions, how a concise argument travels and how slowly a sensible change can move through a corporate body. At Wharton, where she earned an MBA, she acquired a network and the confidence to consider entrepreneurship as a profession rather than a daydream.
Product was the missing discipline. At AliveCor, the mobile heart-technology company, she worked with designers, engineers and data scientists. She learned user research, clinical product work, and the unglamorous craft of turning a good intention into something people can actually use. Her path now appears suspiciously well plotted: doctor, consultant, MBA, product leader, founder. She has been more candid about it. At business school, she once said, she did not yet know what she wanted to do.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my career, so I went back to business school.”Iman Abuzeid
Uncertainty, in her case, was productive. Each stop supplied an instrument the next problem required. Medicine gave her context. Consulting supplied a method. Wharton furnished connections. AliveCor taught her to build. The neatness came later.
The useful failure
The first company idea that Abuzeid and Portlock pursued was not Incredible Health. They began with software intended to help smaller healthcare businesses retain clients. They entered an accelerator, built the product and watched it fail to find the necessary traction. Six weeks before demo day, they abandoned it.
Founders often praise conviction, a word that can be difficult to distinguish from refusing to read the room. Abuzeid and Portlock kept their conviction in the problem and discarded their attachment to the answer. They worked seven days a week for the remaining six weeks and launched the minimum version of what became Incredible Health. HCA became the first customer. The pivot was frantic, but it was not a dart thrown in the dark. Both founders had heard the same labor-market absurdity from opposite sides of their families.
The company was founded in 2017 with an explicit bias toward permanent work. Temporary staffing can fill an urgent shift; Abuzeid wanted to change the durable relationship between employers and professionals. Incredible Health automatically screens and matches candidates, then asks hospitals to initiate. A nurse creates a profile and waits for interested employers, a rather more agreeable use of waiting than refreshing an inbox after another unanswered application.
Moves to the United States and works in hospital operations and strategy.
Co-founds Incredible Health with Rome Portlock after a six-week pivot.
An $80 million Series B values the company at $1.65 billion.
Selected for the TIME100 Next list.
The company reports 1.5 million workers and more than 1,500 employers.
A marketplace chooses a side
Every two-sided marketplace eventually confronts an awkward question: whose side is it on? Incredible Health is paid by employers, but Abuzeid has consistently described it as candidate-centric. The apparent contradiction is the business. Hospitals need people they cannot easily find. The platform becomes valuable to those hospitals by being a place workers trust.
That alignment informs the product choices. Professionals use the career tools without charge. Employers compete for attention. Matching software tries to surface fit before either side spends time on an interview. By 2024, about a million U.S. nurses and 1,500 hospitals were using the platform. By late 2025, the company's own count had reached 1.5 million healthcare workers and more than 1,500 employers.
The financing headline arrived in August 2022. An $80 million Series B led by Base10 Partners valued Incredible Health at $1.65 billion. Andreessen Horowitz, Obvious Ventures and Kaiser Permanente also participated. The milestone made Abuzeid one of a small number of Black women to lead a privately held company worth more than a billion dollars. She treated that rarity as both evidence and indictment: proof that the feat could be done, and a reminder that there should be far more examples.
Recognition followed. Forbes placed her on its 2023 list of America's Richest Self-Made Women. TIME chose her for its 2024 TIME100 Next list. Inc. has named her among its Female Founders repeatedly, including in 2026. Abuzeid's own joke about the Forbes layout was more memorable than the stately language of awards season: was she next to Taylor Swift, or was Taylor Swift next to her?
“We want to be in every category within health care.”Iman Abuzeid
The reversal keeps moving
Incredible Health's more recent products carry the original reversal into a noisier age. Gale, an AI career agent for workers, helps with job discovery, résumés and interview preparation. Lyn, an AI voice interview agent for employers, conducts initial interviews and connects with applicant-tracking systems. The company built the products with input from health systems including Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White, Tenet and Sutter.
The technology is newer, but the complaint underneath it is old. A qualified applicant enters a system and hears nothing. A recruiter inherits too many names and too little time. A vacancy remains open while both sides are technically present. Lyn's promise is that every applicant can receive an initial conversation rather than an automated acknowledgement and a long silence. Gale's promise is that a worker can navigate a career with a guide that understands the differences among specialties and settings.
There is an obvious temptation to let the letters AI do all the storytelling. Abuzeid's record points elsewhere. The company's defining move was made before the current AI boom and did not depend on magical language. It depended on identifying who had leverage and designing the transaction accordingly. Software made the reversal possible at scale. The human judgment was deciding what ought to be reversed.
A fixed point, flexible route
Abuzeid advises founders to keep a clear mission while allowing strategy and tactics to change. Her own career makes the argument without a slide deck. She left the standard medical path without leaving healthcare. She learned product before insisting she could lead a product company. She abandoned an idea six weeks before a public deadline. She expanded a nurse marketplace into a broader career platform, then into tools that sit inside employers' existing hiring systems.
The fixed point has been the worker. Incredible Health's mission is to help healthcare professionals live better lives and find and do their best work. The sentence is broad enough to admit new technology and specific enough to reject a clever product that makes the candidate's experience worse. Company values, which Abuzeid once expected to be a trivial pre-funding exercise, became part of onboarding and performance reviews. She has called them the operating system of the company.
One can tell this as a unicorn story, and the arithmetic obliges: $100 million raised, a $1.65 billion valuation, seven figures of professionals. Yet the more durable story begins before the numbers. A physician and an engineer listened carefully to their relatives. They noticed that two complaints could not sensibly coexist. Then they changed the direction of an arrow.
Every institution accumulates rituals that outlive their logic. Job seekers chase employers because job seekers have always chased employers. Applications disappear because the queue is long and nobody owns the silence. Abuzeid's achievement was to look at a shortage and refuse the usual choreography. When the scarce person is still begging to be seen, she reasoned, perhaps the market is facing the wrong way.