Nurses Have Raised More Than $639 Million. What Can We Learn From It?

Editor’s note: The Commission for Nurse Reimbursement recently completed the inaugural cohort of its Fellowship in Nursing Economics (FINE), a program designed to help nurses understand the financial, operational, and economic forces shaping healthcare. Each Fellow completed a capstone project exploring a challenge facing nursing today, and this new series highlights the three projects selected by their peers as the strongest in the cohort. First up: Niki Pham, whose first-of-its-kind analysis reveals which types of nurse-founded healthcare companies scale and why.

Nurse entrepreneurs represent 0.5-1% of the nursing workforce (Copelli et al., 2019). The current literature only tells us what barriers these nurses run into as entrepreneurs (educational or cultural gaps), but there’s no published research that has examined which of their business models actually scales.

From my time connecting with entrepreneurial nurses at hackathons, accelerators, and venture capital events in the Bay Area, I kept meeting nurse founders building incredible companies. But no one was tracking them. This disconnect is what drove me to build the proprietary RN Forward Nurse Founded (RNF) Company Database. This data created the first systematic, category-level economic analysis of nurse-founded companies. The database answers three questions: 

• Which business categories attract capital?
• Which businesses scale without capital?
• Why does category choice have material consequences for every nurse founder building today?

As of March 30, 2026, the RNF Database is a proprietary dataset of 86 nurse-founded healthcare companies across eight business categories. These categories range from Clinical Software and Medical Devices to Care Delivery, Workforce Technology, and Consumer Health. Each company cleared a formal inclusion screen requiring a nurse co-founder with equity, a scalable business model, and a meaningful impact to healthcare. Scale was defined as 51 or more employees, a successful acquisition, or $1 million or more in verified funding. 39 companies met at least one scale threshold. That’s 45.3%! Considering this founder population has never appeared in a startup dataset before, that’s a pretty gnarly number. Together, nurse entrepreneurs from these 86 companies have raised over $639 million in verified funding.

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This research draws on startup and venture capital vocabulary that doesn’t show up in nursing school or on the unit. Here are 5 crash course terms that nurses need to know before diving deeper into the data.

• Venture capital (VC): Money pooled from institutional investors and placed into early-stage companies as a high-risk, high-reward bet. VC firms bring capital, networks, and operational support alongside that check. They expect significant returns in exchange for the ownership stake they take in the company.
• Angel investment: Early-stage funding from individual investors who write personal checks to companies they believe in, in exchange for partial ownership.
• Non-dilutive funding: Capital that doesn’t require giving up any ownership in your company. Grants, government funding, prizes, and competition awards all fall into this category.
• Bootstrapped: Building and growing a company using personal savings, revenue generated by the business itself, or non-dilutive funding. The company never takes outside investment, thus the founder retains full ownership.
• Scale: A scalable company is one whose business model can grow revenue without proportionally growing costs, usually through technology, replicable service delivery, or market expansion. As mentioned previously, the three thresholds used in this study (51+ employees, a successful acquisition, or $1 million or more in verified funding) each represent an external validation event.

The data makes clear that the business category nurse founders decide to build in has material consequences. Care Delivery achieved the highest organic scale rate in the dataset, largely without venture capital. Bootstrapped acquisitions and headcount-driven growth define outcomes in this category. The largest confirmed exit in the entire dataset ($50 million acquisition of Infinity Infusion Nursing) happened without a single institutional investor on the cap table.

As Infinity Infusion Nursing shows, there is a pathway to scalability while staying bootstrapped. However, the data shows that it is category specific. Only 3 companies in Care Delivery and 1 in Staffing Marketplace have done it. No company in the dataset outside these two categories has bootstrapped to scale.

The dataset also captures something about timing: 64% of these companies were founded in 2019 or later, and 65% currently employ fewer than 10 people. We are looking at a very early ecosystem. Clinical Software is the largest category and the most under-documented, hinting that this may be where the next generation of nurse founders is building, particularly as AI lowers the barrier to entry in software services.

In contrast, the Staffing Marketplace category has taken the most institutional funding. This category has the highest concentration of VC backing, having taken ~$270 million in disclosed funding. That’s roughly one-third of the total money raised by nurse entrepreneurs. Nursing workforce is a known problem with large market potential that went even more mainstream during the pandemic. It’s no surprise that VC firms are looking to capitalize on it.

Where the money comes from, though, matters as much as how much of it there is. Investor quality turned out to be the strongest structural predictor of scale across the dataset. All 9 companies backed by Tier 1 investors (think General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital) scaled. 11 of 49 companies relying on Tier 4 capital (meaning bootstrapped or unknown funding status) scaled, a rate of 22.4%. The initial instinct is to say “well duh, better investors just pick better companies.” However, a Tier 1 investor comes with a check plus network effects. They open doors to the next investor, the strategic partner, the acquirer. The capital is almost secondary to the network that comes with it. When nurse founders disproportionately land at Tier 4, the question isn’t whether their companies are good enough. It’s whether they have access to the rooms where Tier 1 investors are making decisions.

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Skills once reserved for founders with business degrees are being democratized, and this research is empirical proof that nurse founders have been building real, scalable companies for some time now. The RNF Database and newsletter are free, public resources. Consider them your foot in the door.

Niki’s project was one of more than 40 completed during the inaugural FINE Fellowship; more articles from top Fellows are coming in this series.

🤔 Nurses: have you ever thought about turning an idea from the bedside into a business? What stopped you, or what pushed you to try? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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