Forcea European startup building a recruitment marketplace for healthcare professionals has raised €44 million ($47 million) in a Series C funding round.
Founded in Berlin in 2017, Medwing targets healthcare in Germany and the UK with a platform designed to match hospitals and clinics with nurses and elderly care providers, although it also caters to pharmacists, midwives, doctors and similar professionals .
The platform is currently available in Germany and the UK, where it claims some 5,500 registered medical employers and 500,000 healthcare professionals, who have access to a fully digital workflow that includes job search, contracts, signatures and timesheets.
“The current healthcare permanent hiring and staffing market is fractured and still very manual and analogue,” Medwing founder and CEO Johannes Roggendorf explained to businesskinda.com. “Bringing this to a digital marketplace not only saves costs for the healthcare system at large, but also increases the level of service for healthcare professionals and hospitals.”
The Medwing platform
Healthy industry
A quick look at the competitive landscape reveals a host of similar players, especially in the US, where ShiftMed recently raised $200 million; Nomad health insured $105 million; Incredible Health earned $80 million; and Vivian Health raised $60 million.
In Europe, meanwhile, UK-based Florence last year raised $35 millionwhile that of France Hublo has attracted VC money for a comparable market concept.
For its part, Medwing says it wants to differentiate itself from other players with a focus on both permanent and temporary placements. In addition, it works directly with major healthcare customers such as the University Hospital in Berlin charityalso supports traditional recruitment agencies that want to promote their own temps on its platform.
“This allows us to have occupancy rates of 75 percent of all temporary requests within one or two days,” said Roggendorf.
So far, Medwing had raised around €43 million in a few rounds. With another $47 million in the bank, the company said it aims to expand into further European markets in the future, but in the shorter term expects to be profitable by the end of this year based purely on its existing presence in Germany and the UK.
“For now, we are focused on those two countries, but we plan to expand to other European countries to become the leading healthcare job marketplace in Europe,” said Roggendorf. “But at the end of the day, this is a global problem that we’re solving.”
Medwing’s Series C round included contributions from Northzone, Cathay Innovation, Cherry Ventures, Quadrille Capital, Atlantic Labs, Hambro Perks and — somewhat interesting given last week’s Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) fiasco — SVB Capital, the VC entity of SVB.
SVB Capital is not directly affected by the collapsed bank, although their parent company, the parent company of SVB Financial, is apparently in the process of selling its assets, including SVB Capital. We were told that none of this will affect Medwing’s cash outlay.
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