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The spark for , a $1.65 billion platform to tackle staffing shortages in healthcare, came from cofounder and CEO Dr. Iman Abuzeid’s own family.

“A lot of my family members are doctors, surgeons who practice, and they were often complaining about understaffing,” she says in a new interview with �鶹��. “They just don’t have enough nurses in the operating room; they can’t do as many surgeries as they would like.”

At the same time, her cofounder, MIT software engineer Rome Portlock, kept hearing the opposite frustration from nurses in his family. They were experienced and qualified nurses who applied at 10 places and usually didn’t even hear back. 

When Abuzeid and Portlock dug into healthcare hiring around 2017, they found a system stuck in time. “We just realized that the processes, the tools, the technology — nothing’s changed in healthcare hiring in particular for over 20 years. We just figured there just has to be an easier way,” Abuzeid says. 

Incredible Health uses AI to tackle one of healthcare’s biggest crises: chronic workforce shortages. Today, more than 1.5 million nurses (about one in two nurses in the U.S.) use the platform to manage their careers. 

From medical school to founder

Abuzeid was born in Sudan and grew up in Saudi Arabia. She completed a six-year combined undergraduate and medical degree in London between the ages of 18 and 24. 

“I went to medical school because my dad, my two older brothers were doctors as well,” Abuzeid says. “I just figured, hey, other people in the family are doing it, I might as well do it too.”

During medical school, she realized that while being a doctor is “a fantastic career,” she wanted to “have an impact on a much bigger scale.” So she finished her degree, skipped residency, and moved on. She didn’t practice medicine after earning her medical degree. 

Instead, after medical school, she joined McKinsey, doing hospital operations and strategy. Then she went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business to get her MBA with a focus on healthcare management, before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

There, she became a product manager at early-stage healthcare tech startups, learning how to work with engineers, designers, and data scientists. She saw what it actually takes “to build and grow products,” she says. Those skills, combined with her clinical and consulting background, positioned her to see both the pain points and the potential in healthcare hiring.

Flipping the hiring model

In 2017, “all the stars aligned” for Abuzeid. She had the advantage of living in the Bay Area and she had experience working for startups. That year, she left her product role to start Incredible Health. “It was a good time to start and to become an entrepreneur, which is a dream that I’ve had since I was young,” she says. 

Incredible Health’s first product was a two-sided marketplace, but with an important twist: employers apply to nurses, not the other way around. Nurses sign up and create a profile, entering their preferences. After that, employers send them interview requests. The nurses decide which interviews they want to accept and which ones they want to decline. 

That reversal resonated immediately. “The healthcare workers absolutely loved that,” Abuzeid says. 

Building a marketplace meant confronting the problem of needing both employers and workers. Abuzeid’s solution was to start narrow. The company launched only in the Bay Area, then added Los Angeles, and stayed in California for about two years. That geographic focus made it manageable to build the product and gather feedback before expanding to other parts of the country.

Reaching unicorn scale

Today, Incredible Health has just under 100 employees and supports about 1,500 hospitals and facilities, including major national systems, regional networks, academic medical centers, community hospitals, surgery centers and home health organizations.

The platform now includes continuing education, salary estimators, and AI-driven services in addition to its core marketplace. There are two main AI offerings: a voice agent named and another one named . Gale is a career partner for healthcare workers, which helps create resumes and run mock interviews. Lyn can conduct interviews on behalf of employers, interviewing candidates in days, not weeks. Abuzeid both AI agents in September 2025. 

“We are saving each HR team member one to two months of their time with our agents right now,” she notes. “That’s meaningful, and that’s changing their job description.”

Financially, the company has raised about $100 million, and in 2022, it reached a $1.65 billion valuation, making it a unicorn. Revenue comes primarily from a subscription model in which employers pay for access to the platform. Nurses can sign up for free. 

Lessons for founders

Abuzeid emphasizes that founders should have a clear, steady North Star. “Always try to have a very clear vision [and] mission,” she says. “Your strategy and tactics change over time, but just make sure your North Star, where you’re ultimately headed, stays consistent and authentic.”

One of her most striking points is about mental health and leadership. Citing Ben Horowitz, Abuzeid says that “the number one job of a CEO is to manage your own psychology.” In her eyes, the mental health of founders and CEOs has not been talked about enough. 

Abuzeid credits therapy, executive coaching, a peer group of CEOs and firm boundaries with making sure that work doesn’t take over her life. She invests in herself so she can stay effective in her role over the long term. 

Underneath the unicorn valuation, Abuzeid’s motivation remains to help nurses find employment. She roots her goal in her original training and her family’s experiences in medicine. 

“I think healthcare workers are some of the most overworked and underappreciated workers in this country,” she says. “It’s a privilege to be able to build products and solutions that help them and help their employers too.”