Inside Incredible Health: How Iman Abuzeid Built a $1.7B Hiring Marketplace

Iman Abuzeid turned customer pain into strategic gold, building a healthcare hiring platform worth $1.7 billion by flipping the traditional model and obsessively refining it to scale nationwide.

Key Takeaways

• Iman Abuzeid co-founded Incredible Health after a failed startup taught her to listen deeply to customer pain points and act with precision.
• The platform flips the hiring script: hospitals apply to nurses, not the other way around, creating a nurse-first experience.
• Incredible Health is now used by over 1,500 hospitals and more than 1 million nurses across the United States.
• Strategic geographic constraints and obsessive control over unit economics guided the company’s early-stage growth model.
• The platform has helped hospitals save tens of millions annually by dramatically reducing reliance on temporary staff and costly overtime.
• Abuzeid's leadership style champions structured decision-making, ROI accountability, and relentless customer empathy.
• Ongoing expansion includes extending the platform to new healthcare roles, AI-powered matching, and lifelong career development services.

From Medicine to Marketplace: Iman Abuzeid's Unlikely Path

• Trained as a medical doctor in London, Abuzeid quickly realized she wanted to impact healthcare systems, not just individual patients.
• She transitioned into consulting with McKinsey in New York, gaining exposure to complex operations and business dynamics in healthcare.
• Her Wharton MBA further equipped her with tools in strategy, finance, and product thinking.
• A deliberate move to San Francisco put her in close proximity to venture capital, early-stage startups, and product-centric innovation.
• Joining a healthcare tech firm as a product manager introduced her to agile methodologies and the mindset of rapid iteration.
• That role also clarified the power of software to deliver scale and unlock efficiencies in slow-moving sectors like healthcare.
• Her first startup stumbled, but gave her both the scar tissue and insight needed to identify real, scalable problems worth solving.

Strategic Reset: Why Her First Startup Failed and What Came Next

• The initial venture targeted patient retention for small clinics—a real problem, but hard to scale and monetize.
• Despite a few paying customers, growth was flat, and user feedback showed weak product-market fit.
• Abuzeid and her co-founder, Rome Portlock, joined the NFX accelerator where they re-evaluated everything.
• They interviewed dozens of stakeholders across hospitals, HR, and clinical teams.
• A repeated pattern emerged: hospitals couldn’t fill permanent nursing roles fast enough, and nurses were burnt out and disengaged.
• That became their wedge: make nurses feel empowered by flipping the hiring dynamic.
• They combined automation, credential vetting, and a consumer-grade UX to deliver a differentiated product.

Flipping the Script: How Incredible Health Redefined Hiring

• On Incredible Health, hospitals compete to hire nurses—an inversion of the typical job board power structure.
• The system handles license validation, specialty tagging, and geographic preferences to ensure high match relevance.
• Nurses can sit back and receive interview requests, dramatically streamlining their job search experience.
• What used to take 80 days now happens in under 20, with success rates improving month over month.
• On the hospital side, it reduces over-reliance on travel nurses, lowering labor costs and improving workforce stability.
• Employer dashboards provide real-time analytics, helping HR teams optimize hiring funnels.
• The result is a true two-sided marketplace, delivering ROI to institutions while uplifting healthcare workers.

Growth by Design: Why They Stayed in California for Two Years

• Abuzeid resisted the pressure to scale prematurely, a rare move in a venture-driven environment.
• For two full years, Incredible Health operated only in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
• This laser focus allowed them to perfect supply-demand balance, iterate quickly, and build operational discipline.
• Their first hospital partner, HCA, was secured through cold outreach. Recruiter Gloria became an internal champion, helping shape roadmap priorities.
• Product features like resume parsing and candidate tracking emerged directly from user feedback.
• Weekly product reviews included real user recordings to maintain empathy at scale.
• That cultural commitment to customer voice remains intact, with Abuzeid still personally reviewing calls and Net Promoter Scores.

The Case for Slow Scaling and Smart Fundraising

• In a world obsessed with speed, Abuzeid prioritized quality, metrics, and margin over raw growth.
• They didn’t raise Series A until they had clear retention data, positive unit economics, and scalable systems in place.
• When the time came to expand nationally, customers had already begun requesting their presence in new markets.
• Strategic expansion followed demonstrated demand, not investor pressure.
• They avoided dilution and retained control over company direction by funding later and from a position of strength.
• This restraint also helped them beat broader platforms like ZipRecruiter, who lacked the industry-specific depth.

Business Model and Mission: Serving Both Sides

• Revenue comes from hospitals who pay for access, while nurses access the platform for free.
• The B2B revenue model is paired with a B2C user experience, offering personalized support for job seekers.
• In addition to job matching, nurses gain access to continuing education modules, salary comparison tools, and live career coaching.
• This career-long service model increases engagement, LTV, and brand loyalty.
• More than a third of U.S. nurses have interacted with Incredible Health, signaling deep market penetration.
• Expansion into allied health roles like technologists, medical assistants, and therapists is underway.

Looking Ahead: Vertically Integrating the Workforce Pipeline

• Abuzeid knows that tech alone won’t solve healthcare’s staffing crisis.
• The U.S. lacks the clinical education capacity to train enough nurses to meet demand.
• That’s why Incredible Health is launching initiatives to fund training, mentor early-career nurses, and increase credentialing access.
• They've introduced remote-first continuing education, with plans for AI-powered learning tools tailored to specialties.
• Partnerships with nursing schools and state boards are in development to grow the supply side.
• The future vision includes end-to-end workforce development: from training to placement to upskilling to retirement.
• The company is positioning itself as the career backbone for the entire healthcare labor force.

Iman Abuzeid has built more than just a unicorn startup. She’s created a blueprint for value-based scaling in a high-stakes industry. Her blend of rigor, humility, and vision proves that patient-first thinking can power billion-dollar outcomes. Entrepreneurs, take note: this is what modern leadership looks like.