America’s hospitals are spending around $97bn a year renting staff they cannot train fast enough. Stepful thinks AI can fix the supply side, and investors have just handed it $55mn to try.
The New York startup has raised a Series C led by healthcare-and-fintech investor Oak HC/FT, with new backers Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, and the Citi Impact Fund joining existing investors including Y Combinator and the hospital group Intermountain Health.
Stepful runs what it calls “school-as-a-service”: it trains healthcare workers for hospitals directly, replacing the enrolment caps and manual workflows of legacy trade schools with an online, AI-assisted pipeline.
The pitch has found buyers. Stepful says it has graduated more than 32,000 “practice-ready” workers since it was founded and now counts more than 35 health systems as clients, among them Mount Sinai, Ochsner, and Providence.
It was named the top US edtech company by TIME and Statista last year. Its model offers employer-sponsored, debt-free training that, it says, can take someone from a high-school diploma to a six-figure healthcare job without leaving work or taking on student loans.
The opportunity is a structural shortage.
Hospitals have leaned on expensive contract and agency staffing because the training pipeline for nurses, technicians, and allied-health roles was never built to scale, and the hands-on parts of those jobs are exactly the ones AI cannot do.
Stepful’s bet is that an always-on platform, which sharpens as it ingests more student and clinical data, can widen that pipeline more cheaply than colleges or staffing agencies.
The new money will fund expansion into advanced programmes, including registered nursing, respiratory therapy, and imaging, and further work on the company’s AI. “This capital allows us to expand our partnerships with hospitals and health systems [and] launch advanced degree programs,” said co-founder and chief executive Carl Madi.
Oak HC/FT’s Vig Chandramouli called Stepful “the only company we have seen that combines online education with a sophisticated AI engine to solve the talent supply problem at scale”.
The claims are bold, and worth weighing against AI-in-education’s patchy record, where adaptive-learning promises have often outrun results. But Stepful sells to employers rather than students, which ties its revenue to outcomes hospitals can measure: whether graduates pass certification and stay in the job.
That is a sturdier business than most AI healthtech pitches, and it explains why investors keen on applied AI are writing cheques.
For now, Stepful joins a growing field of companies pitching themselves as healthcare infrastructure rather than software. Whether it becomes the “foundational” layer it claims, or one of several, the $55mn buys it room to find out, and a health system desperate for workers gives it no shortage of demand to chase.
