A hospital cannot fill a shift with a job posting. It needs a person who is licensed, experienced in the right specialty, willing to work at that location, and prepared to say yes. Yet for years the ritual was oddly backward: the hospital posted, the nurse applied, and everyone waited. In the families of Incredible Health's two founders, that waiting produced two different complaints. Iman Abuzeid's physician relatives talked about understaffed hospitals. Rome Portlock's nurse relatives talked about applying for jobs and hearing nothing back.
- Incredible Health matches healthcare workers with permanent roles; employers approach vetted candidates.
- Hospitals pay a flat subscription. Nurses use the job and career tools for free.
- The founders abandoned an earlier product and launched this one in six weeks.
- Its reported network now includes 1.5 million healthcare professionals and more than 1,500 employers.
The symmetry was embarrassing. One side could not find the right people; the other could not get a reply. Abuzeid, a doctor by training who had moved into consulting and technology, and Portlock, an engineer, decided to change the order of the invitation. On Incredible Health, nurses create profiles and state preferences. Hospitals search and send interview requests. The nurse chooses which conversations to accept. The scarce professional gets to be courted.
The first idea had six weeks to live
This was not the founders' first healthcare product. While working at AliveCor, they had considered software to help small and midsize care providers keep customers. They carried that idea into the NFX accelerator. It failed the unromantic test: it was not growing. With six weeks until demo day, they dropped it. Abuzeid later described seven-day weeks building the replacement minimum viable product. HCA became its first customer, and Obvious Ventures led a seed round soon after.
The pivot was neither a grand theory of artificial intelligence nor an attempt to make every sort of medical hire at once. It was a narrower bet: permanent nurses, initially in the Bay Area. The company added Los Angeles and stayed in California for roughly two years. A marketplace needs enough relevant people on both sides in the same place. A nationwide launch would have looked impressive on a map and thin on a recruiter's screen.
“We didn't have product-market fit, and it wasn't growing. We had to pivot during the accelerator.”Iman Abuzeid, recalling the original product
The difference is who does the asking
A job board gives employers a place to publish and candidates a place to apply. A staffing agency usually fills a defined vacancy and charges for placement or temporary labor. Incredible Health sits between those models. It maintains a marketplace of healthcare workers, checks qualifications, matches for permanent roles and lets employers initiate contact. Hospitals pay monthly or annual flat-fee subscriptions; the company does not publish a universal price. Nurses can use its hiring tools without paying. That is the answer to what it costs, at least as far as public prices allow.
The arrangement puts pressure on the company to keep nurses interested even when they are not actively changing jobs. Its career resources include salary information, resume help, job guidance and continuing education. That makes commercial sense: an experienced nurse may not be searching today, but the hospital will need that nurse tomorrow. It also makes the promise harder to keep. A nurse's attention cannot be stockpiled like a list of email addresses.
A vacancy has a carrying cost
Speed is the employer pitch, though the numbers should be read as reported customer results, not guarantees. At Johns Hopkins' ambulatory surgery centers, the company's case study gives an average of 21 days to hire through Incredible Health against 95 days without it, plus $750,000 in annualized savings from lower premium labor use. Montefiore Nyack says the platform sourced 33 percent of its nurse hires in 2023; its case study reports a 96 percent retention rate among those hires. Alameda Health System says 70 percent of its hires through the marketplace filled difficult specialties, including ICU and emergency care.
A customer case study comparison, not a prediction for every hospital. The operational point: vacant roles can keep agency and overtime bills alive.
The critical word is permanent. A travel nurse can cover an urgent shift. A permanent hire is an attempt to stop buying the same emergency every month. That is why a faster recruiting process matters to a chief nursing officer, a finance team and the clinician taking the job for different reasons. The company reports its marketplace hires stay 15 percent longer than the average; that claim, like its savings figures, comes from Incredible Health's own data.
Two voices enter the waiting room
In September 2025, Incredible Health added Gale and Lyn. Gale is a career companion for healthcare workers: it helps turn work history into a resume and offers voice interview practice tailored to a nurse's specialty. Lyn works for the employer. It can call candidates, discuss roles, check qualifications and hand recruiters a structured interview summary. The company says Lyn was developed with teams at Johns Hopkins, Baylor Scott & White, Tenet and Sutter.
The more consequential development came in March 2026. Lyn gained connections to common applicant tracking systems, including certified integration with Workday, and became available even to employers outside the Incredible Health marketplace. That changes its market. The original service depended on attracting both hospitals and clinicians to one network. Lyn can now address the pile of applicants already inside a hospital's own system. A hospital still has to judge the person and make the offer; a voice agent can shorten the queue before that conversation.
There is a practical distinction here from a general-purpose recruiting bot. Nursing roles turn on licenses, settings and specialties. A medical-surgical nurse, an ICU nurse and a surgical technician are not interchangeable keyword matches. Incredible Health says its agents draw on millions of hiring interactions from its marketplace. Whether that produces better decisions in every setting remains an empirical question, but the product is aimed at a real source of delay: applications that receive no timely human response.
What the reversal teaches
The company's $80 million Series B in 2022 valued it at $1.65 billion. That is a financing milestone, not proof that every hospital saves the same amount or that every nurse lands the right role. The interesting mechanism is smaller and more transferable. Find which side of a labor market is genuinely scarce. Give that side a reason to participate. Start in a geography dense enough to make matching useful. Charge the party with the budget, then watch carefully that its wishes do not overwhelm the other side's trust.
It is also clear where the mechanism strains. A hospital that cannot make prompt offers, improve schedules or retain staff will not fix those problems with a faster introduction. Alameda's case study describes weekly recruiter and hiring-manager check-ins and changes to onboarding, education and flexibility alongside the marketplace. The software can open a door. The employer still has to make the room worth entering.
That is why the founding contradiction remains useful. Hospitals needed nurses. Nurses needed replies. The founders did not solve it by making another place to wait. They made the hospital knock first.