Trusted Health is what happens when a nurse and a software engineer get tired of the same broken industry.

It is 6:47 a.m. somewhere in Texas, and a travel nurse named Priya is checking her phone before she's even checked her coffee. The screen is not Indeed. It is not a recruiter's voicemail. It is the Trusted Health app, showing her a 13-week contract in Boise that pays exactly what it says it pays, with housing math already done. She accepts in two taps. Across the country, in a San Francisco office that smells faintly of cold brew and ambition, an engineer ships a small change to the matching algorithm. Nobody mentions it. Nobody has to.

This is what Trusted Health looks like in 2026 - quietly, almost rudely, working.

02 / THE PROBLEMThe industry nobody loved

For decades, travel nursing was run by phone banks. A nurse looking for a contract would talk to three recruiters at three agencies who would quote three different pay rates for the same hospital. Onboarding involved fax machines. Pay was opaque. Housing stipends were a rumor. The clinician - the person whose job was, again, keeping patients alive - was treated like the least sophisticated party in the transaction.

Hospitals didn't love it either. They paid markups they couldn't audit, scrambled for warm bodies during every flu season, and had no real-time picture of who was on the floor versus who was supposed to be. The system worked the way airline travel worked in 1985: it worked, but nobody enjoyed it.

03 / THE BETThree founders, one unfashionable idea

In 2017, three people decided to do something about it. Lennie Sliwinski, who had spent the prior chapter of his career running candidate acquisition at Hired - essentially Tinder for software engineers - looked at healthcare and noticed that nurses were treated worse than developers and were arguably more important. Matt Pierce came in on engineering. Sarah Gray, a working nurse, came in as the founding clinician. The bet was simple and, at the time, not especially fashionable: build a marketplace where clinicians act like the protagonists of their own careers, not the inventory in someone else's spreadsheet.

Investors took some convincing. Healthcare staffing was profitable but unsexy, and venture capital had spent the prior decade in love with consumer apps. Trusted picked up a $3.4M seed from Founder Collective and Felicis. Then a Series A led by Craft Ventures. Then a Series B. By November 2021, the company closed a $149M Series C led by StepStone Group - in the middle of a pandemic that had quietly made nurses the most valuable workforce in the country.

04 / THE PRODUCTTwo products, one bet

There are really two Trusteds, which is part of the trick. The first, the consumer-facing platform, is the side most clinicians know. A nurse downloads the app, builds a profile, sees real pay rates, talks to a Care Team of actual working nurses, and books contracts. The bureaucracy - licensure, compliance, credentialing, housing - is shoved behind a clean interface and largely automated. Onboarding that used to take weeks happens in days.

The second Trusted is Works, the enterprise platform launched alongside the Series C. Works lets a hospital build its own internal labor marketplace - a "Trusted, but yours" for full-time staff, per-diem, and float pools. The Works.ai layer ingests preferences, skills, fairness rules, and shift requirements and proposes schedules that don't make charge nurses cry. Hospitals pay for the software. Clinicians get more flexibility. The agency middlemen, conveniently, get less of a cut.

05 / THE PROOFWhy hospitals are paying for it

It is one thing to be loved by nurses. It is a harder thing to be paid for by the procurement office of a 1,200-bed hospital. Trusted has been doing both for several years now. Strategic investors include the Texas Medical Center and Healthbox, which is the polite way of saying: actual hospital systems are not just using the product, they are funding it. Reported annual revenue is in the neighborhood of $232M. The team is around 460 people, which is small for a company moving this much labor and large enough that someone has to schedule the all-hands.

06 / THE MISSIONNot a slogan, an org chart

Mission statements are easy to print on the wall and hard to act on. Trusted's is unusually plain: get every clinician the job they want, and every patient the care they need. The interesting tell is the org chart. The Clinical Care Team is staffed with working nurses, not retrained sales reps. Product decisions get a bedside reality check. The CEO will, when cornered, talk about transparency in pay as if it were a moral issue, because it is one.

There is a useful detail that says a lot: Trusted's product fonts are Grosa and Tiempos Text. Most healthcare software is set in whichever font shipped with Windows in 2009. The choice to care about typography in a category nobody thinks of as design-led tells you what kind of company is building this.

07 / WHY IT MATTERS TOMORROWThe labor question, in scrubs

The shortage of nurses in the United States is not a temporary supply-chain inconvenience. It is a structural feature of demographics, burnout, and a baby boom that is now in its hospital years. The country will need every clinician it can find, and it will need to find them efficiently. The companies that handle that matching well will quietly become some of the most consequential infrastructure of American healthcare. The ones that handle it badly will continue to charge $300 an hour for travel ICU nurses while the system frays.

Trusted's bet is that software, used well, makes more clinicians possible - not because it manufactures people, but because it removes the friction that drives them out. Less paperwork. Faster onboarding. Honest pay. A care team that picks up the phone. The argument is not glamorous. It is just correct.

08 / BACK TO PRIYAWhat changed by 6:48 a.m.

It is now 6:48 a.m. in Texas. Priya has accepted the Boise contract. The compliance team in Trusted's San Francisco office is already pulling her files. A Care Team nurse - someone who has actually worked night shifts in an ICU - will be on a Slack channel in case she has questions about Idaho licensure. By the time her coffee is finished, the paperwork is queued. A decade ago this would have taken three weeks, two recruiters, and a fax machine that nobody under thirty knows how to operate.

That is the company, in one minute. A nurse, a phone, and a piece of software politely refusing to behave like the industry it is in. The rest is footnotes.