Healthcare has a staffing crisis, and everyone knows it. Surgeons can’t fill operating rooms. Nurses send out applications into the void and hear nothing back. It’s a mess that’s been a mess for decades, largely because nobody bothered to fix it.
Then Dr. Iman Abuzeid noticed something while talking to her family. Her relatives, all doctors and surgeons, were constantly complaining about not having enough nursing staff. Meanwhile, her cofounder Rome Portlock was hearing the exact opposite complaint from nurses in his family: they were qualified, experienced, and applying everywhere with almost no response.
That gap between supply and demand should have been an easy fix. It wasn’t, because the hiring infrastructure in healthcare hadn’t meaningfully evolved since the early 2000s. No better tools. No better processes. Just the same broken machinery running on fumes.
The Radical Idea: Let Workers Say No
When Abuzeid and Portlock dug into the problem around 2017, they realized the entire system was backwards. In most industries, candidates apply to jobs and then employers decide. Incredible Health flipped that. Nurses create profiles listing their preferences. Employers then apply to them. The nurses decide which interviews to take.
It sounds simple. It shouldn’t be revolutionary. But it was.
“The healthcare workers absolutely loved that,” Abuzeid told Entrepreneur in a recent interview. And why wouldn’t they? For once, they had agency. For once, they weren’t screaming into the abyss.
This wasn’t naive idealism either. Abuzeid had built a real career before starting the company. She completed a combined undergraduate and medical degree in six years in London, then chose not to practice medicine. Instead, she worked at McKinsey on hospital operations and strategy, then got an MBA from Wharton focused on healthcare management. She spent years as a product manager at early-stage healthcare startups in the Bay Area, learning how products actually get built.
She saw the problem from multiple angles. She understood both the clinical pain and the operational inefficiency. That perspective mattered.
Starting Small, Thinking Big
Building a two-sided marketplace is notoriously difficult. You need employers and workers simultaneously, or the whole thing collapses. Abuzeid’s solution was almost boringly pragmatic: start in one place, get really good, then expand.
Incredible Health launched in the Bay Area, then added Los Angeles. The company stayed in California for about two years before going national. That geographic focus meant they could actually gather real feedback, iterate on the product, and understand what worked before betting the company on national expansion.
Today, the platform supports about 1,500 hospitals and facilities. More than 1.5 million nurses (roughly one in two nurses in the U.S.) use it to manage their careers. In 2022, Incredible Health hit a $1.65 billion valuation, making it a unicorn.
When AI Enters the Room
The core marketplace worked. Then Abuzeid and her team started adding layers. Continuing education. Salary estimators. And most recently, AI agents.
In September 2025, Incredible Health debuted two AI tools. Gale is a career partner for healthcare workers, helping them build resumes and run mock interviews. Lyn conducts interviews on behalf of employers, turning weeks-long hiring processes into days. According to Abuzeid, these agents are saving each HR team member one to two months of work.
That’s not hype. That’s a concrete change to how people spend their time at work. It’s changing what their jobs actually are.
The business model is straightforward: employers pay for platform access through a subscription. Nurses sign up for free. That asymmetry makes sense. Nurses have historically been the ones with less power in this equation. Giving them free access and making employers pay is a small gesture toward rebalancing.
Revenue from that model, plus about $100 million in fundraising, has kept the company growing without the desperation that sometimes clouds startup thinking.
The Unsexy Part of Leadership
What’s interesting is what Abuzeid emphasizes when she talks about building Incredible Health. It’s not the technology or the valuation or the growth metrics. It’s something much less glamorous: mental health.
Citing Ben Horowitz, she notes that “the number one job of a CEO is to manage your own psychology.” Abuzeid has talked openly about using therapy, executive coaching, peer groups of other CEOs, and firm boundaries between work and life. She’s investing in her own stability so she can stay effective over the long term.
This sounds obvious when you say it out loud. In practice, it’s rare for founders to admit they’re struggling, let alone that they’re actively working on their mental health while running a multibillion-dollar company. The culture around founder psychology is changing, slowly, but Abuzeid’s willingness to name it matters.
The Thing That Keeps Her Going
Underneath all of this, Abuzeid’s core motivation is still rooted in her original training and her family’s experience. She thinks healthcare workers are “some of the most overworked and underappreciated workers in this country.” That’s not a startup pitch. That’s a conviction.
She finished her medical degree. She could have practiced. Instead, she spent a decade getting smart about operations, strategy, and product design so she could build something that mattered to the people doing the actual work.
The question now is whether Incredible Health can sustain that focus as it grows. Can a company stay committed to flipping power dynamics when the incentive structures push toward optimization and extraction? The marketplace works because it genuinely serves nurses better. That’s not an accident. It’s a choice. The question is whether that choice survives success.
