Doctor Iman Abuzeid is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Incredible Health, a digital platform that helps streamline the hiring process for nurses and recruiting hospitals. In August 2022, after it raised an $80 million Series B round, she made history as only the fourth Black woman ever to lead a company’s valuation to unicorn status at $1.65 billion. Now, Incredible Health is the fastest-growing career marketplace for permanent healthcare workers.
“As the highest valued tech-enabled career marketplace in healthcare, we’ve transformed how nurses are hired and will build on this work to help health systems and healthcare workers manage surging patient demand in the midst of a national labor crisis,” Abuzeid said in a statement.
Dr. Abuzeid, who was born in Saudi Arabia to Sudanese parents, has an entrepreneurial streak running in her blood. Both of her grandfathers were entrepreneurs, with one starting Sudan’s first transportation company and the other finding success as a farmer, real estate manager, gas station owner, and merchant. She credits them with inspiring her to take risks. She says her mother instilled in her the values of hard work and a tenacious attitude.
Dr. Abuzeid also has two older brothers who are surgeons, and she followed suit by attending medical school in the U.K. where she graduated from University College London. After realizing she wanted to focus on systemic healthcare challenges, she moved to the United States and had stints at Booz & Co., the Harvard School of Public Health, and McKinsey & Co. Her work has involved treatment and prevention of blindness in the Middle East, modeling the economic value of vaccinations, managing collaborations between hospitals and pharma companies to improve clinical-protocol development, and boosting operational efficiencies of large health systems. She then attended business school at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her Master of Business Administration.
All the while, the idea for Incredible Health was brewing. After meeting Co-Founder Rome Portlock, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology alum from a family of nurses, the idea came to fruition in 2017. Incredible Health is backed by top tier venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Obvious Ventures.
So far, Dr. Abuzeid has managed to intentionally and successfully fly under the radar. But with her medical background, the smashing success of Incredible Health, her business prowess and understanding of venture capital, that may not be the case for much longer.