Editor’s note: The following is the sixth profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interviews with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here, Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner here, Tabs founder Ali Hussain here, Craft founder Ilya Levtov here, and GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti here.
After completing medical school in London, Iman Abuzeid decided not to pursue a residency. Her father was disappointed.
But she didn’t change her mind because she lost interest in healthcare. Instead, Abuzeid realized she wanted to work on problems affecting more people than she could treat individually.
“Working as a doctor is great, but you’re only working with one patient at a time,” she said in an interview with Crunchbase News. With software, “you have millions of users using your products.”
Abuzeid went on to co-found Incredible Health, a San Francisco-based healthcare hiring platform that has raised about $97.5 million from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Base10 Partners, Obvious Ventures, Precursor Ventures and NFX. It says its products are used by 1.5 million healthcare professionals — including 1 in 2 U.S. nurses — and 1,500 healthcare employers.
Before launching Incredible Health in 2017, Abuzeid trained as a doctor, advised healthcare companies at Booz Allen and McKinsey, and worked as a product manager at a health tech startup, but didn’t know how to code software.
An M.D. who chose not to practice
Originally from Sudan, Abuzeid was born and raised in Saudi Arabia and also lived in the United Arab Emirates. She moved to London at 18, where she completed her undergraduate education and medical school.
Her interest in business predated her medical career. Both of her grandfathers were entrepreneurs in Sudan, and she grew up hearing about the companies they built. By medical school, she was increasingly drawn to the reach that entrepreneurship and technology could offer.
After earning her medical degree, Abuzeid immigrated to New York at age 24. Her time in healthcare consulting at Booz Allen and McKinsey exposed her to the strategy, operations and economics behind the healthcare system, she said.
She later earned an MBA from the Wharton School, specializing in healthcare and entrepreneurship, and moved to San Francisco in 2013.
There, she joined an early-stage healthcare technology company as a product manager. The role taught her how to work with engineers, data scientists and designers, as well as how software products are built and grown.
It was also where she met Rome Portlock, the software engineer who would become her co-founder at Incredible Health.
Abuzeid still does not code, although she has experimented with newer AI-assisted coding tools. Portlock, an MIT-trained engineer who she calls “the best engineer I’ve ever worked with,” has led Incredible Health’s engineering and data teams from the beginning.
But Abuzeid, the startup’s CEO, argues that a software founder’s central job isn’t writing code.
“At the end of the day, when it comes to creating software companies, it’s about solving problems,” she said. “It’s about identifying the markets, understanding the problems customers are facing and figuring out ways to solve them.”
A mismatch in healthcare hiring
The problem behind Incredible Health surfaced through conversations the founders were having with people they knew.
Doctors in Abuzeid’s family and circle of friends frequently complained about understaffing. At the same time, nurses in Portlock’s family described applying to numerous jobs and often receiving no response.
The two accounts did not line up. Healthcare is the largest U.S. labor sector by number of workers, Abuzeid said, and it faces severe staffing shortages. Yet experienced nurses were struggling to get the attention of employers that urgently needed them.
“We started to dig into it more, and we were like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’” she recalls.
The founders discovered that hospital recruiting teams were often small, overwhelmed by applicant volume, and reliant on manual processes.
Incredible Health’s marketplace reverses the usual hiring process so that employers are actually the ones applying to healthcare workers. The software automates screening and matching for permanent jobs at hospitals, surgery centers, home health organizations and other healthcare facilities.
The service is free for healthcare professionals. Employers pay an annual subscription to use the marketplace and the company’s other hiring software. Customers include Kaiser Permanente, Tenet Health, Trinity Health and Johns Hopkins.
A selective approach to fundraising
Incredible Health has raised approximately $97 million across seed, Series A and Series B rounds.
It was a process, she admits. She spoke with about 70 investors while raising the company’s seed round. Eight invested, including Obvious Ventures and Precursor Ventures.
At that stage, Abuzeid said, she had to educate investors about the healthcare labor market and persuade them that she and Portlock were the right founders to address it.
“I think it was the vision and the mission and the team,” she said. “At that point, you’re really investing in the founders.”
Each of Incredible Health’s funding rounds was oversubscribed, Abuzeid said. She attributes that partly to raising from a position of financial strength. The company generally operates close to cash-flow break-even and at times has been cash-flow positive.
Overall, Abuzeid said she is selective about which investors she approaches. Specifically, she prefers firms with marketplace experience and partners who have previously operated companies. She also prioritizes investors who have already backed women or founders of color.
“I don’t want to be the first,” she said. “I’m not here to overcome someone’s bias. That’s not a good use of my time.”
While she acknowledges structural disparities in venture funding, Abuzeid said she didn’t choose to work with Portlock because she believed she needed a male co-founder. Rather, she recognized that a strong technical partner would balance her own skills and abilities.
Overall, Abuzeid believes female founders generally need to emphasize ambition. In her view, investors are used to hearing expansive visions from male founders, and women should be equally vocal about the size of the companies they intend to build.
“It’s really important to be ambitious and to be very clear about your vision and what you’re trying to achieve,” she said.
Automating the first interview
In 2025, like many other startups, Incredible Health incorporated AI into its product lineup.
The company developed the agents with healthcare systems including Baylor Scott & White Health, Sutter Health, Johns Hopkins and Tenet Health. Working with customers during the development process made it easier for Incredible Health to incorporate the technology into established enterprise workflows, Abuzeid noted.
One agent, Lyn, conducts the initial recruiter interview, asks clinical and behavioral questions, explains an employer’s value proposition, and discusses available roles. It then hands the candidate off for a possible interview with a hiring manager.
A second agent, Gail, helps healthcare professionals create résumés and practice for interviews.
Abuzeid said Lyn has reduced hiring time by 30%. Three-quarters of interviews now occur within 24 hours of a candidate applying, compared with up to two weeks previously. About 40% take place at night or on weekends, when recruiters are less likely to be available.
The AI products clearly extend Incredible Health’s initial mission of removing hiring delays in the healthcare industry. They also reflect the founders’ complementary roles. Portlock continues to oversee engineering, data and technical architecture, while Abuzeid’s work draws on her experience across medicine, healthcare consulting and product management.
For Abuzeid, that distinction shows why she does not consider technical chops a prerequisite for founding a software company.
“At the end of the day, when it comes to creating software companies,” she said, “it’s about solving problems.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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