YC W25

Healthcare • Workforce Tech • New York

YouShift

The OS for hospital workforce management

Hospital scheduling is a full-time job nobody wanted. Spreadsheets, last-minute panics, exhausted administrators, and doctors who can't even see next week's rota without phoning someone. YouShift kills the chaos - with AI that writes the schedule, handles swaps, and keeps everyone compliant, automatically.

1K+ Doctors

$500K Raised

W25 YC Batch

The Problem

Hospitals run on chaos

Walk into any hospital scheduling office and you'll find something that looks like a scene from a disaster movie: an administrator surrounded by whiteboards, sticky notes, and a spreadsheet nobody fully understands, fielding phone calls at 6am because someone called in sick.

Most hospitals spend serious budget on full-time staffing coordinators whose entire job is managing a schedule that changes every day. The software that supposedly helps? Complex, unintuitive, and somehow still manual. Doctors spend more time chasing shift info than reading X-rays.

The downstream cost is staggering. Inefficient scheduling leads to over-staffing in some units, dangerous understaffing in others, staff burnout, and billions in lost productivity across the healthcare system. This is not a small inconvenience. It is a structural failure with patient safety implications.

"Teams spend hours juggling shifts, fixing errors, and handling last-minute changes. YouShift automates all of it."

- YouShift, YC W25 Launch

The Product

One platform. Zero spreadsheets.

YouShift describes itself as the OS for hospital workforce management - and the ambition is real. The platform handles every layer of staff scheduling, from generating the initial rota to tracking who clocked in at what time.

🤖

AI Schedule Generation

The engine takes staff availability, preferences, skill requirements, and compliance rules, then spits out a fair, balanced schedule - without anyone manually building it. No more "how did we schedule three nurses in cardiology and zero in emergency?"

🔄

Automated Swap Management

Staff submit swap requests. The system checks eligibility, compliance, and coverage, then approves or flags for review. No more group WhatsApp chaos. No more administrators as human routers for shift requests.

📱

Mobile Apps (iOS & Android)

Doctors and nurses see their shifts, set availability, request time off, and clock in and out - all from their phone. Real-time updates mean no more calling the office to confirm next week's schedule.

✅

Compliance Tracking

Healthcare scheduling is not just a logistics problem - it's a regulatory one. YouShift tracks labor regulations, rest periods, and hospital policy requirements, flagging violations before they become a problem.

The Team

Three Harvard alumni. One very messy hospital problem.

YouShift was founded by three people who met as undergraduates at Harvard and decided that healthcare workforce management was broken enough to fix. The team originally operated out of Madrid before relocating to New York.

Lucía Vives Martorell

Co-Founder

Brings a biomedical science background from UCL and Harvard. Her understanding of hospital operations shapes how YouShift approaches the clinical side of scheduling - not just as an admin problem, but as a patient care problem.

Harvard • UCL

Adolfo Roquero Gimenez

Co-Founder

Part of the founding trio who turned what could have been a final-year project into a Y Combinator-backed company. His technical contributions helped YouShift build a product that can handle the complexity of real hospital environments.

Harvard

Jota Chamorro

Co-Founder & CPO

As Chief Product Officer, Jota drives how YouShift translates messy hospital scheduling reality into a product doctors and administrators actually want to use. Harvard-trained, with a product instinct for what "simple" means in an environment as complex as a hospital ward.

Harvard

Mission & Vision

Not just a scheduler. The entire workforce OS.

YouShift frames its mission clearly: eliminate the chaos of staff scheduling and help hospitals reclaim time and money for patient care. That's a narrow, focused statement - and it matters. Startups that try to fix everything usually fix nothing.

But the vision goes further. The company has publicly compared its long-term ambition to Rippling for healthcare - a single operating system that covers the full scope of workforce management. Not just schedules, but payroll integration, compliance, shift analytics, and workforce planning. The scheduling tool is the wedge. The OS is the goal.

Healthcare has always been slow to adopt modern software. Hospitals still run on legacy systems built in the 90s and patched together with Excel sheets. YouShift is betting that the combination of mobile-first UX, AI automation, and a team that genuinely understands clinical operations can break through where generic HR software has failed.

The positioning is smart. Rather than selling to hospital IT departments with 18-month procurement cycles, YouShift appears to be building bottom-up adoption - doctors and nurses who love the product creating internal pressure to move from the legacy system.

Y COMBINATOR W25 • NEW YORK

With Y Combinator's backing and a $500K seed round closed in February 2025, the team has the runway to prove the model at scale. The early numbers - over 1,000 doctors already using the platform across Europe and the US - suggest they've found something real.

Y Combinator Team Ignite Ventures Harvard Ventures Xfund

Track Record

What they've actually done

Accepted into Y Combinator Winter 2025 - one of roughly 160 startups selected from thousands of applicants worldwide.

January 2025

Closed a $500K seed round led by Y Combinator with participation from Team Ignite Ventures, Harvard Ventures, and Xfund.

February 2025

Over 1,000 doctors using the platform across Europe and the United States - real clinical professionals, not demo accounts.

2025

Presented at YC W25 Demo Day (March 12-13, 2025), pitching to the world's most active early-stage investor community.

March 2025

Mobile apps live on both Apple App Store and Google Play, giving healthcare workers a native tool for managing their schedules.

2025

Timeline

How it unfolded

2023

Three Harvard students identify hospital scheduling as a broken system worth fixing. YouShift is founded, initially based in Madrid, Spain.

January 2025

YouShift joins Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch - one of approximately 160 startups selected from a global applicant pool. The team relocates to New York.

February 2025

$500K seed round closes. Investors include Y Combinator, Team Ignite Ventures, Harvard Ventures, and Xfund. The funding provides runway to scale across Europe and the US market.

March 2025

YouShift presents at YC W25 Demo Day alongside 159 other startups. The product goes live on the YC Launch platform with the pitch: "AI-powered shift scheduling for healthcare."

2025 - Ongoing

Platform grows past 1,000 doctors across two continents. Mobile apps available on iOS and Android. Team hiring founding engineers to accelerate product development.

Worth Knowing

The details that stick

All three co-founders met as undergraduates at Harvard - making YouShift one of those "started in college" stories that actually has legs.

The company started in Madrid, Spain before pivoting its base to New York - following the YC gravity towards the US market.

The "Rippling for healthcare" framing is deliberate. Rippling is a $13B company. YouShift is not being modest about its target category.

The Twitter bio says YouShift wants to help hospitals "reclaim time and money for patient care" - which is a unusually honest way to pitch a scheduling tool.