When we reached out to Carl Madi in 2021 about joining our founder residency, Grand Central Tech, he was in the very earliest stages of building Aja School, the company now known as Stepful, which has just raised a $31.5mm Series B led by Oak HC/FT. Carl had recently left his role as GM at Handy, and had previously been leading global strategy at Uber. He had built his early career on incentivizing gig economy workers and understanding the dynamics of these markets, and had seen firsthand what living–and working–through a pandemic was like for those whose livelihoods depend on these jobs. Gig economy workers represented as much as 35% of the U.S. workforce in 2020, roughly 57 million Americans. Carl knew that most of them wanted better jobs–more stable, more secure, higher paying, and with opportunities for growth. They wanted careers. 

The mission of Stepful has always been front and center to the business: to create economic opportunity for 1 million job seekers in healthcare, and to solve the shortage of credentialed staff that is weighing down our health system. Staffing is a hair-on-fire problem for healthcare employers: there simply are not enough trained workers licensed and credentialed for needed jobs. Today, there are an estimated 3mm open healthcare jobs. That number is expected to balloon to 4mm by 2031.Of those jobs “80% require a post-secondary degree or credential beyond a high school diploma. Yet only 47% of Americans 25+ have any 2- or 4-year college degree. Of these degrees, less than 18% are in health professions.” 

In three years, Stepful has built out proprietary online coursework and hybrid, AI-enabled training programs to create an affordable and flexible on-ramp for healthcare careers. In doing so, they have become one of the preeminent education and placement channels for entry-level healthcare staff. Their work, however, does not stop at placement. A career in healthcare is more than just that first job– it is an opportunity for continuous learning and rewarding growth. Stepful is partnering directly with employers to build an end-to-end platform for health systems to manage and retain their workforce – to enable upskilling, new credentialing, and ongoing growth and education.   

Carl’s vision to reimagine healthcare education to serve both job seekers, as well as the health systems that face critical staffing shortages and a crisis of burnout and turnover, has always been squarely aligned with our healthcare thesis. As technology investors, we are inclined to invest in software businesses that optimize for efficiency–to do more with less (often, less people). But, as healthcare investors, we know that providing care to a population that needs a lot of it requires a lot of skilled people. We invested in Stepful very early on because they were doing both– building tech to optimize the biggest bottlenecks in workforce entry, upskilling, and retention by making education and training requirements far more accessible, and growing the human workforce as a result. 

At a time when very few digital health startups were focused on the top-of-funnel workforce problem, Stepful was. When most startups are leveraging AI to replace jobs, Stepful is leveraging technology to create them. And now, their first principles approach is paying off. Far more important than this fundraise milestone, is exactly what Stepful has accomplished in these three short years: 7,000 medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, and surgical technicians trained, graduated, and licensed for new careers in healthcare, 14 health systems partnering with Stepful to fill open roles and provide education pathways for their most critical employees to achieve meaningful career growth, and a team of 40 mission-driven healthcare and ed-tech innovators behind it all. Led by co-founders Carl Madi, Tressia Hobeika, and Edoardo Serra, Stepful has built the fastest, most scalable training platform for healthcare jobs ever created, launched it in all 50 states, and already changed thousands of people’s lives for the better. They are just getting started.

The conviction with which we initially and subsequently invested in Stepful’s Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds has carried over into a doubling down on our workforce thesis within healthcare. Through our early stage Funds and our incubation platform, Terrarium, workforce solutions is one of four core themes in healthcare that we will be building and investing in alongside seasoned founders and expert EIRs. Informed by our early investments in Stepful (workforce training), Nomad Health (nurse staffing), Reverence Care (home health scheduling), and Elaborate (physician burnout, inbasket management), we believe workforce shortages remain a massive problem for providers and patients, and one that recent advances in technology have a growing opportunity to solve. If you are building a company or exploring ideas in: 1) workforce planning/predictive analytics for workforce; 2) physician and billable provider upskilling; 3) automation of non-clinical work; 4) education benefits and enablement; 5) employee productivity, performance tracking, and incentives… please reach out! margaret@companyventures.com.