Lennie Sliwinski

Lennie Sliwinski grew up watching his mother navigate the chaos of nursing - the frantic phone calls, the opaque scheduling, the staffing agencies that collected fat commissions while leaving nurses in the dark about what they'd actually earn. It wasn't abstract to him. It was dinner-table conversation in Youngstown, Ohio.

That upbringing became a business thesis. In 2017, he co-founded Trusted Health alongside Matt Pierce - a colleague from their time at Hired.com - to build what the staffing industry had never bothered to build: a transparent, digital-first marketplace where nurses could see exactly what a contract paid, apply without a recruiter middleman, and manage their careers with the same ease they'd expect from any modern consumer app.

Eight years later, the platform has over half a million nurse profiles, partnerships with more than 1,500 hospitals across all 50 states, and $234 million in total funding. The company that started as a travel nursing marketplace has since evolved into Trusted Works - an enterprise workforce management operating system now deployed by health systems like Mercy.

The Unusual Route: Law School, Marketing, Then Nurses

There's a version of Lennie Sliwinski's story where he becomes a corporate attorney. He went to Cornell Law School, passed the New York bar exam, and has the credentials to prove it. He just never opened a practice.

Instead, he moved to Austin and joined Adlucent, a performance marketing analytics firm. He's described that period as "the equivalent of earning a master's degree in marketing" - where he built the analytical muscle that would later let him manage a $30 million acquisition budget at Hired across 17 markets, pulling in 15,000 new job seekers a week. That scale taught him something: how a marketplace actually grows.

At Hired, he worked alongside Matt Pierce, who was running the company's temp staffing arm. Pierce had seen the same dysfunction Sliwinski had watched his mother navigate. When they decided to build together in early 2017, the target was clear - the 4 million registered nurses in the United States, an enormous workforce stuck using outdated, commission-driven placement agencies to find jobs.

Building in the Open: Trusted Health's Growth Arc

The early pitch was simple enough: kill the commissioned recruiter. Give nurses direct visibility into pay rates, contract terms, and assignment details. Let them apply digitally without a phone-tag relationship with an agency rep.

Within two years, the model was working. By 2019 the platform was registering 1,000 new nurses per week, had coverage across half the US states, and Sliwinski had been named to the Staffing Industry Analysts 40 Under 40 list - one of the rare recognitions that actually means something in the sector. A $20 million Series A followed.

The company's Series B ($55 million, led by Craft Ventures and Felicis Ventures) came next, then the pandemic changed everything. Healthcare labor moved from a back-office concern to a board-level crisis overnight.

In November 2021, Trusted announced a $94 million Series C led by Greenspring Associates - bringing total funding to $234 million. Paired with that announcement was the launch of Works, a workforce management platform aimed at the enterprise level. Where the original product was a marketplace for nurses to find jobs, Works was a full operating system for health systems to manage their entire clinical labor operation: internal staff, contingent workers, scheduling, analytics, and - by 2024 - AI-powered predictive matching through a Google DeepMind Gemini 1.5 integration.

The Works Platform - From Marketplace to OS

The jump from labor marketplace to enterprise software is not a natural one, and many startups have failed trying to pull it off. Sliwinski's framing for why it made sense was characteristically direct:

Works brought external and internal labor sources into a single interface - giving health system administrators real-time visibility into their staffing gaps, predictive matching to fill them, and a single platform to track everything from credentialing to payroll automation. Mercy Health, one of the early enterprise adopters, projected a 12% increase in fill rates and $2 million in nursing labor cost reductions within six months of implementation.

The October 2024 KLAS Research Emerging Company Spotlight recognition confirmed what early adopters had already seen: Works was reducing clinician burnout through better scheduling, and health systems were paying attention.

On Leadership - Building the Team Behind the Platform

One detail that stands out in Trusted Health's executive build: the senior leadership team Sliwinski assembled is 80% women. That's not a talking point - it's a consequence of hiring Kate Kline (former ZocDoc executive, 20+ years in healthcare) as President in January 2023, Sue Nallapeta as CTO in March 2023, and Beatrice Pang as CFO. He has been unusually transparent about the value he places on outside advisors too.

Sliwinski's take on the moment the industry is in reflects the same systems-level thinking he's applied to the business itself - less about individual technology wins, more about which organizations understand that workforce strategy is now a competitive advantage:

Career Timeline

Funding History