Clipboard Health: Doing Well By Doing Good

Not many founders dedicate their lives to lifting people up the socioeconomic ladder. Wei Deng is this founder, and her company, Clipboard Health, is a marketplace that connects healthcare facilities to healthcare professionals in a way that provides more opportunity and flexibility for the industry at large. Today, we are proud to announce that Clipboard has closed two funding rounds – IVP’s Series B investment in June 2021 and Sequoia Capital’s Series C financing in February 2022.

Here’s why we invested:

A Massive, Important Market

From nurses to lab assistants, healthcare professionals in the United States are overworked and underpaid. Many hospitals and healthcare facilities face a critical shortage in trained personnel, leaving them grappling with ways to adequately care for their patients. Over the past two years, the pandemic has only aggravated the strain on our increasingly fragile system.

Our healthcare system fails to meet the needs of the very people who work within it. For instance, many nurses want to have flexibility and control over their schedules but struggle to find additional units of work within the opaque healthcare system. Similarly, healthcare facilities face unpredictable needs and often experience shortages of trained personnel.

Clipboard presents a solution to this problem: its marketplace matches healthcare professionals at scale to healthcare facilities that want to hire a large number of part-time staff. By creating a mutually beneficial system that fits the needs of both healthcare professionals and facilities, Clipboard resolves many of the frustrations and talent shortages in the modern healthcare system.

Improving Economics at Scale

We’ve worked with many successful marketplaces and were amazed by Clipboard’s unit economics and strong, capital-efficient growth in this large market. We’ve seen these favorable dynamics grow even stronger as Clipboard adds liquidity on both sides of the marketplace, with natural network effects strengthening over time. Both facilities and workers are meaningfully better off by using Clipboard’s platform, which is a testament to how much this product is needed.

Mission-Driven Team

Clipboard is the story of a tenacious, mission-driven founder who has the ability to execute against all odds and lift others up along the way. Witnessing her parents’ give up their professorships in China to work as restaurant staff upon immigrating to the US, Wei’s childhood shaped her purpose as an entrepreneur. After graduating from Yale and Yale Law School, Wei was determined to apply her intellect to solve a greater problem: how to make the “American dream” more accessible to people across the socioeconomic spectrum. With the initial idea of Clipboard in mind, Wei drove countless miles from facility to facility, interviewing nurses and prototyping early versions of the product. Her insights from these visits led to the company’s initial success. Wei is joined by an incredible team including Bo Lu, George Markoulakis, and Mike Cook, dedicated to improving the healthcare system and the lives of workers everywhere.

There is a world of opportunity above and beyond what Clipboard Health is doing today. The company has already noticeably improved the healthcare system by providing workers with opportunities to have more control over when and how much they want to work. This is what the “future of work” can look like in a better world, beyond the healthcare industry. We look forward to supporting Wei and the Clipboard team as she continues her journey to make a lasting impact on the world.