
The Philadelphia nurse-turned-founder built a company from questions nobody owned - then learned that the durable kind of growth begins when you stop confusing motion with progress.

The nurse-turned-founder spent two decades turning a frontline frustration into Lifespark. His wager is simple: the future of senior living begins with a life, not a list of services.
Ilana Borkenstein is the co-founder and CEO of M7 Health, a New York healthtech company building nurse staffing and scheduling software designed by the people who live the night shift. A registered nurse who worked a bone marrow transplant unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering - the literal M7 floor the company is named for - she turned a Harvard Business School class project into a platform now used daily by tens of thousands of clinicians across more than 60 hospitals. M7 has raised about $17 million, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, on a single idea: fix nurse scheduling not as a math problem but as a human one.