A shortage of medical staff is a near-universal problem for healthcare providers. Demand for healthcare workers is expected to continue to grow faster than supply due to a rapidly aging population and high turnover.
The United States is projected to face a shortage of millions of health care workers by 2030, including medical assistants, home health aides, and nursing assistants.
The founders of startup Stepful saw the need to modernize healthcare education and training and create an AI-powered healthcare workforce pipeline that helps health systems build, train, and retain their workforces.
Stepful has secured $55 million in Series C funding led by Oak HC/FT to expand its AI healthcare talent infrastructure platform. The round was supported by existing investors SemperVirens, Y Combinator, and Intermountain Health, as well as new investors Foresite, Hearst Ventures, and Citi Impact Fund.
News of the Series C funding round was first shared with Fierce Healthcare.
The company has raised $105 million to date, with $31.5 million in Series B funding in November 2024.
Launched in 2021, Stepful provides fast and affordable training for healthcare professionals. The company offers employer-sponsored, debt-free pathways to students and directly connects graduates to post-certification job opportunities through partnerships with health systems and other health care providers across the country.
Stepful’s programs currently include medical assistant, pharmacy technician, medical office, nursing practice, dental assistant, surgical technician, and plans to expand into more advanced programs.
Traditional education models require attending community college or vocational school, which can cost up to $20,000 and take up to two years, creating a barrier for individuals who want to pursue entry-level health care jobs, Stepful CEO and co-founder Karl Maddie told Fierce Healthcare.
“Stepful is focused on training people with a high school education to get into healthcare jobs. Essentially, we’re an AI-powered learning platform, and by using technology and AI, we can make that education much more cost-effective. So a medical assistant program could potentially be as much as 10x cheaper and 4x faster,” Maddy said.
“We’re both an academic institution and a technology company. What’s important to us is that we’re really employer-centric in our education, so employers can choose who they want to train and when they want to train them. And we can provide them with our technology and our certification status so they can train someone,” he said.
Health systems can also improve the skills of their medical staff to fill more advanced positions.
Stepful executives say traditional trade schools operate under enrollment caps and manual workflows, causing demand for health care workers to outstrip education and training pipelines. Health systems are increasingly reliant on contract talent, costing them $97 billion annually, largely because their certification and training pipelines are not built for scale.
Stepful has built a vertically integrated platform that delivers school-as-a-service to health systems, replacing low-tech, human-bottlenecked processes with always-on training and intelligence layers, executives said.
Maddy argues that Stepful’s employer-side model is unique, as the company aims to partner with and develop the next generation of healthcare workers. And, he noted, Stepful provides individuals with a more affordable and faster path to the medical profession.
“We’re taking high school graduates, hiring them into the health system, training them and upskilling them. That means they can reach six-figure grades within six to eight years without incurring debt while working full-time. I think this is a different way of how the education system works, and I believe it’s a very powerful way to address the workforce shortage,” he said.
The company currently partners with more than 35 major health systems, including Ochsner Health, Providence Foundation Health Partners, The Ohio State University Physicians, and Mount Sinai. Since its founding, Stepful has graduated more than 32,000 career-ready healthcare workers and reported significant revenue growth.
Last year, the company acquired St. Louis Nursing Career University in St. Louis, Missouri, adding accredited academic programs to its education and training programs.
With the new funding, Stepful plans to build partnerships with health systems and launch advanced degree programs in nursing and respiratory technology, Maddy said. The company also plans to strengthen its AI capabilities.
Madi spent 10 years scaling high-growth startups like Uber, Airbnb, and Amino Apps, and led the direct-to-consumer business for Handy, an online marketplace for cleaning staff. He teamed up with Tressia Hobeika, who previously worked at Udacity, and former Apple engineer Edardo Serra to launch Stepful.
Stepful’s platform works with all aspects of clinical education, from instruction and simulation to assessment and workforce planning. The company is integrating AI into its workforce development and education pipeline through personalized learning, interventions, and assessments. Stepful combines AI-driven support with instructor-led live sessions, and its AI platform delivers bite-sized, interactive learning modules.
The company’s technology also provides AI-powered clinical simulation with high-fidelity avatar-based patient encounters that recreate real-world clinical scenarios, enabling immersive training without the constraints of physical infrastructure.
Historically, clinical skills required physical school simulation labs. Stepful uses AI to remotely teach and assess students’ hands-on clinical skills by providing them with home health kits. Stepful can also do remote assessments. The platform can perform multimodal assessments of students’ physical and verbal performance in real time, without delays in feedback loops, through autonomous clinical competency assessments.
For employers, Stepful provides a platform layer that helps health systems screen, map, and upskill existing staff.
“We are able to produce a large number of work-ready graduates,” Maddy said. “By partnering with employers, we can enable them to train their own employees or train members of their community. We can bring schools into the health system and help schools train their employees in the skills they want. This shifts the model from a highly centralized education system to a centralized, employer-centric education system.”
Mount Sinai is working with Stepful to establish a specialized patient care associate training program focused on training personnel for ancillary clinical support roles with skills in electrocardiography (EKG), phlebotomy, and direct patient care.
“This partnership will support the development of a broader, more sustainable pipeline of ancillary staff from the communities we serve. By investing in these roles, we strengthen our care teams now while ensuring we are ready to meet patient needs in the future,” Jane Maqsood, RN, senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Mount Sinai Health System, said in a statement last month.
“Stepful is the only company that combines online education with an advanced AI engine to solve talent supply problems at scale,” Vig Chandramouli, partner at Oak HC/FT, said in a statement. “This team has sustained growth at an incredible pace with more than 30 major healthcare system clients, including Ochsner, Advent Health and Providence. Our continued investment reflects our belief in both the leadership and the platform they have built.”
