Stepful's Platform Has Graduated 32,000 Health Workers — and Now It's Hiring Them as Instructors

A $55M Bet That Healthcare's Staffing Crisis Is Really a Supply Problem

Stepful raised $55 million in Series C funding on June 8, 2026, pushing the New York-based healthcare training platform's total capital past $105 million. Oak HC/FT, a growth equity firm managing over $7 billion, led the round. New investors Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, and the Citi Impact Fund joined, alongside returning backers SemperVirens, Y Combinator, Intermountain Health, and ECMC Education Impact Fund.

The size of the round reflects a specific thesis: healthcare's staffing crisis is a supply problem, not a recruiting problem. Health systems spend an estimated $97 billion a year on contract staffing to fill gaps the traditional training pipeline was never built to address. Legacy trade schools operate under enrollment caps and manual workflows that cannot keep pace. Stepful's pitch (and the reason Oak HC/FT led) is that an AI-powered, vertically integrated platform can produce practice-ready workers faster and at lower cost.

"Stepful is the only company we have seen that combines online education with a sophisticated AI engine to solve the talent supply problem at scale," said Vig Chandramouli, Partner at Oak HC/FT. "This team has sustained an extraordinary pace of growth, with 35+ major healthcare system clients, including Mount Sinai, Ochsner, and Providence."

Since founding in 2021, Stepful has graduated more than 32,000 healthcare workers. The platform covers the full clinical education stack (instruction, simulation, assessment, and workforce planning) and offers employer-sponsored, debt-free pathways that let workers move from a high school diploma to a certified role without loans or career interruption.

The new capital will fund expansion into advanced degree programs in nursing, respiratory therapy, and imaging, along with deeper AI development.

Inside Stepful's Hiring Surge

Stepful's careers page lists open roles across six departments, and the mix reveals where the company sees its next phase of growth. Engineering is staffing up at senior and staff levels — Staff Software Engineer, Staff Product Engineer, Senior Full Stack Software Engineer, two engineering manager roles — all hybrid out of its SoHo office. That's a team building for platform depth, not just feature velocity.

But the roles that don't fit a typical startup org chart matter most. Stepful is hiring clinical instructors, nurse educators, surgical technology instructors, sterile processing instructors, and travel clinical educators — contract and full-time positions spread across New York City, Toledo, Ohio, and remote. These aren't software jobs. They're healthcare workforce jobs, the same roles Stepful's platform trains students into. The company is scaling the supply side of its own marketplace in lockstep with demand from health systems.

On the operations and strategy side, the pattern holds. Group Manager, Operations. Senior Operations Manager. Senior Manager, Healthcare Strategy & Operations. Director, Healthcare Strategy & Operations. Senior GTM Manager, Allied Health. These roles sit at the intersection of education, workforce development, and B2B sales — a blend that barely existed five years ago. They exist because health systems don't need another learning management system. They need a partner that can map local labor market gaps, build curriculum around them, place students into clinical rotations at partner sites, and track outcomes after graduation.

Salary ranges on several roles put Stepful in competitive territory with both health-tech startups and the health systems themselves:

All include equity.

What the hiring slate reveals is a structural shift. Health systems have spent decades relying on nursing schools, community colleges, and temp staffing agencies to fill workforce gaps. Those pipelines are shrinking (enrollment bottlenecks, faculty shortages, burnout-driven turnover). Stepful's pitch, and the reason Mount Sinai and Providence keep signing on, is that an AI-powered training platform can compress the timeline from interested candidate to practice-ready hire without depending on traditional infrastructure. The 32,000-plus graduates already placed suggest the pitch is landing.

For anyone tracking workforce development or health-tech operations as a career path, the signal is clear: this category is creating roles that didn't exist a cycle ago, and the companies building the platforms are hiring as fast as the health systems are buying.

How the Platform Actually Works

Stepful operates what it calls "school-as-a-service." Health systems outsource their workforce training pipeline to Stepful, which delivers the entire instructional stack (enrollment, coursework, simulation, assessment, and workforce planning) through a single online layer. Students attend live instructor-led classes, complete interactive assignments, and prepare for national certification exams, all remotely. Programs in medical assisting (5 months), pharmacy tech (4 months), and dental assisting (4 months) each culminate in a recognized credential.

Where the AI enters is less about replacing instructors and more about making the system compound. CEO and co-founder Carl Madi described it in the funding announcement as a flywheel: every student interaction, clinical outcome, and employer data signal feeds back into the platform, making it "smarter, faster, and more defensible over time." The specifics of the AI's architecture — what models it uses, how it adapts content, where it intervenes in the learning path — are not public. But the business logic is clear. Legacy trade schools run on enrollment caps and manual processes. Stepful's bet is that an always-on, data-ingesting platform can widen the pipeline more cheaply and faster than any physical campus.

The employer-sponsored model is what makes this more than another online course marketplace. Health systems pay to train workers directly, and students get debt-free pathways — no commuting to campuses, no student loans. Stepful says its graduates have moved from a high school diploma to a six-figure healthcare career without leaving the workforce. The company reports more than 32,000 practice-ready graduates since founding, with 8,000+ clinical partners hosting students for in-person hours.

That employer-facing structure also gives Stepful a sturdier revenue model than most education startups. The company sells to hospitals, not students, which ties its income to outcomes health systems can measure: certification pass rates and job retention.

The $55 million will fund expansion into registered nursing, respiratory therapy, and imaging programs, along with further AI development. Whether the platform can maintain quality as it scales into more advanced clinical roles is the open question — adaptive learning in education has a history of promises outrunning results. But with 35+ health systems already contracted and $97 billion in annual contract-staffing spend to replace, Stepful has no shortage of demand to chase.

Why Health Systems Are Choosing Tech Over Traditional Staffing

The healthcare staffing market is worth $45.75 billion in 2025, per Coherent Market Insights. Travel nurse staffing alone accounts for 31.5% of that figure. But the dominant model (throwing contract labor at vacancies) is losing its grip. Health systems burn through operating margins on temporary staff, and the pipeline of new clinicians isn't keeping up. The World Health Organization estimates a global shortage of 5.9 million nurses. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 1.9 million healthcare openings each year. Against those numbers, traditional staffing agencies sell a stopgap while the hole keeps widening.

Stepful's pitch is different: build the workforce instead of renting it. And the health systems signing on are signaling the math is starting to work.

Three forces are driving the shift. First, burnout. The National Council of State Boards of Nursing reports that more than 138,000 nurses left the workforce between 2022 and 2024, and nearly 40% of remaining nurses intend to leave by 2029. Contract labor doesn't fix that. It masks it, at a premium. Second, cost. Hospitals spent an estimated $97 billion last year on contract staffing, driven largely by the failure of traditional training pipelines to produce credentialed workers fast enough. Third, speed. Licensing and credentialing move slowly, leaving qualified clinicians waiting while patient needs go unmet.

This is where AI-powered workforce platforms find their opening. McKinsey reported that 85% of healthcare leaders were testing or using generative AI as of Q4 2024. The Deloitte 2024 Global Healthcare Outlook found predictive AI deployed to forecast patient volumes, adjust staffing, and identify high-impact patterns in resource needs. At Mayo Clinic, generative AI auto-drafts clinical documentation in real time, cutting nursing charting time by 37%. Providence uses AI tools to predict which new hires will stick, improving retention rates by 22%.

Stepful's approach fits inside this trend but targets a different bottleneck. While most AI staffing tools match candidates to open roles, Stepful trains candidates from scratch — online education combined with an AI engine that moves people through certification and into employment. It's school-as-a-service, vertically integrated, replacing what Fierce Healthcare described as "low-tech, human-bottlenecked processes with an always-on training and intelligence platform."

The competitive landscape is fragmented. Staffing incumbents like Aya and AMN dominate the $45.75 billion market by placing travel nurses and locum tenens physicians. Workforce optimization platforms like ShiftKey and Trusted Health use data analytics to improve scheduling and reduce agency spend. Stepful sits in a narrower lane: it doesn't compete for the same candidates. It creates new ones.

That distinction matters because the shortage is structural, not cyclical. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortfall of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034. Nursing schools turn away qualified applicants because of faculty shortages, not lack of interest. No amount of recruiting efficiency solves a pipeline constricted at the source. Health systems that partner with Stepful are, in effect, building their own supply.

The risk is execution at scale. Training platforms need health system clients to provide employment outcomes; health systems need trained workers to justify the partnership. Stepful's Series C and its client list suggest the flywheel is spinning. But the competition isn't standing still. As Deloitte noted, AI is quickly becoming a competitive necessity across the sector — and the staffing firms that integrate technology effectively are already reducing costs and improving both client and candidate experiences.

For engineers and operators watching the space, the next generation of healthcare workforce companies won't look like staffing agencies. They'll look like infrastructure.

New York's Quiet Health-Tech Moment

Stepful's headquarters sits at 408 Broadway in Manhattan. The company lists 115 employees on Built In NYC and has been hiring aggressively out of the city for roles spanning software engineering, operations, product marketing, and clinical strategy. Zero G Talent's board currently shows Stepful with open roles tied to New York City, including a Senior Software Engineer position paying between $157,000 and $208,000 and a group operations manager for surgical services at $160,000–$190,000. These aren't remote-anywhere postings. They're anchored to a city quietly assembling the workforce infrastructure health systems across the country depend on.

New York's health-tech identity has historically lived in the shadow of Boston and San Francisco. Those cities own the biotech narrative (drug discovery, device manufacturing, clinical trials). But a different kind of health-tech company has been clustering in New York, built around the operational problems of running a health system: staffing, training, scheduling, billing. Stepful fits squarely in this category. So do companies like Nomad Health, the healthcare staffing marketplace that TechCrunch covered in 2020 and that Oak HC/FT's Chandramouli explicitly contrasted with Stepful's model. The distinction matters: Nomad moves existing clinicians around the market. Stepful creates new ones.

That creation pipeline is what's drawing investor attention to New York specifically. AlleyCorp, one of Stepful's backers, is a New York-based venture firm founded by Kevin Ryan, who built the city's early tech ecosystem through companies like MongoDB and Business Insider. Reach Capital, another participant in the Series B, focuses on education technology with a strong Northeast presence. Y Combinator, though based in Silicon Valley, has increasingly seen its health-tech graduates plant flags in New York for go-to-market reasons — the city's hospital systems are massive, concentrated, and desperate for staffing solutions.

Stepful's client list reinforces the New York logic. NY Presbyterian Hospital, one of the largest health systems in the country, is a stated partner. Mount Sinai and Ochsner Health, also on the roster, represent the kind of large, multi-site hospital networks that need scalable training pipelines more than a single staffing agency can provide. These aren't regional players testing a pilot. They're national systems whose operational pain points justify a platform approach.

The hiring footprint tells the same story. Stepful's open roles on Zero G Talent's board skew heavily toward operations and B2B enablement — Senior Operations Manager for B2B Operations Enablement, a surgical services operations role at the same level, Senior Operations Manager for Career Coaching. These are the people who build and maintain relationships with health system clients. Placing them in New York puts them within commuting distance of some of the largest hospital systems in the country and within a talent pool that already understands enterprise healthcare sales cycles.

Built In NYC lists Stepful as hybrid, with employees in-office Tuesday through Thursday and 15 work-from-anywhere days per year. That structure (three days on-site, flexibility the rest of the time) is becoming the standard for New York health-tech startups that need to recruit from a metro area spanning three states but still want the density of in-person collaboration. It competes directly with fully remote offers from companies headquartered in lower-cost markets.

The broader ecosystem is following. Indeed lists 256 health-tech startup jobs in New York City. Wellfound and TopStartups.io both track dozens of newly funded New York health-tech companies hiring across engineering, product, and operations. The city's advantage isn't cheap lab space or proximity to research hospitals — it's the concentration of health system decision-makers, the depth of the operations and engineering talent pool, and a growing set of investors who understand that the next wave of health-tech value creation is in workforce infrastructure, not just clinical innovation.

Stepful didn't choose New York by accident. The company's entire model — training non-college-educated workers for clinical roles and placing them into partner health systems — depends on proximity to the employers buying the product. As those employers keep signing on, the talent follows. And as the talent follows, the hub reinforces itself.

What Stepful's Trajectory Says About Healthcare Labor

The global AI in healthcare market is projected to grow from $39.34 billion in 2025 to over $1 trillion by 2034, according to Fortune Business Insights. That trajectory isn't driven by a single product category — it's the result of health systems fundamentally rethinking how they build, train, and deploy their workforces. Stepful's Series C and its 35+ health system clients are one visible data point in a much larger structural shift: AI-powered workforce platforms are becoming infrastructure, not experiments.

In the first half of 2025, digital health venture funding reached $6.4 billion, slightly ahead of the same period in 2024, per Resourcera. For 60% of healthcare organizations, AI budgets are growing faster than overall IT budgets. AI isn't competing for a slice of existing tech spending — it's claiming new budget lines entirely.

What's changing is the nature of the work itself. The American Association of Medical Colleges projects a U.S. shortfall of 86,000 doctors by 2036, and nurse vacancy rates in Europe already exceed 10%, Mordor Intelligence data shows. Health systems can't recruit their way out of these gaps. Instead, they're turning to platforms that use AI to accelerate training, automate administrative tasks, and augment clinical decision-making — the exact model Stepful is scaling.

The technology is maturing fast enough to justify the bet. Ambience Healthcare, built on OpenAI's GPT-5, launched an inpatient clinical documentation integrity tool that helps hospitalists capture accurate, compliant diagnoses during the patient encounter rather than after the fact. Oracle Health partnered with Cleveland Clinic and G42 in May 2025 to build an AI healthcare platform aimed at improving care delivery through data analytics. These aren't pilot programs — they're production deployments at major institutions.

Deloitte's research found that 75% of leading healthcare companies are experimenting with or planning to scale generative AI across the enterprise, and 82% have or plan to implement governance structures for it. The organizations that will win aren't just adopting AI tools — they're redesigning workflows around them. That requires operators who understand both the technology and the clinical context, a combination that's rare and increasingly valuable.

The challenge is real. Seventy-seven percent of organizations cite immature or unreliable AI tools as the top barrier to broader adoption, per Resourcera. Regulatory uncertainty and financial concerns follow close behind. The EU AI Act classifies most clinical algorithms as high-risk, adding 12–18 months to clearance timelines. Vendors that invest early in audit trails and compliance documentation will have a structural advantage as regulations converge.

Stepful's trajectory (from startup to a platform trusted by Mount Sinai, Ochsner, and Providence) is a case study in what happens when a workforce training company builds an AI engine that health systems can't ignore. The $55M round isn't just fueling a hiring blitz. It's a bet that the future of healthcare labor is software-defined, and that the companies building the training infrastructure will sit at the center of a trillion-dollar market.

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