Medwing, a recruitment marketplace for Europe’s healthcare workforce, raises $47M

Medwing, a European startup building a recruitment marketplace for healthcare workers, has raised €44 million ($47 million) in a Series C round of funding.

Founded out of Berlin in 2017, Medwing targets the healthcare industry in Germany and the U.K. with a platform designed to match hospitals and clinics with nurses and elderly caregivers, though it also caters to pharmacists, midwives, doctors, and similar professionals.

The platform is currently available in Germany and the U.K., where it claims some 5,500 registered medical employers and 500,000 healthcare professionals, who can access an entirely digital workflow spanning job search, contracts, signatures, and timesheets.

“The current permanent recruiting and temporary staffing market in healthcare is broken and still very manual and analogue,” Medwing founder and CEO Johannes Roggendorf explained to TechCrunch. “Bringing this to a digital marketplace will not only save costs for the healthcare system overall but also increase the service levels for healthcare workers and hospitals.”

The Medwing platform

Healthy sector

A quick peek across the competitive landscape reveals a slew of similar players, particularly in the U.S. where the likes of ShiftMed recently raised $200 million; Nomad Health secured $105 million; Incredible Health nabbed $80 million; and Vivian Health drew in $60 million.

In Europe, meanwhile, U.K.-based Florence last year raised $35 million, while France’s Hublo has attracted VC cash for a similar marketplace concept.

Medwing, for its part, says its setting out to differentiate from other players with a focus on both permanent and temporary placements. Moreover, while it works directly with major healthcare clients such as Berlin-based university hospital Charité, it also supports traditional recruitment agencies looking to market their own temporary staff on its platform.

“This allows us to have a 75 percent fill-rate of all temporary requests within one or two days,” Roggendorf said.

Prior to now, Medwing had raised around €43 million over a couple of rounds. With another $47 million in the bank, the company said that it’s eyeing expansion to further European markets down the line, but in the nearer term it expects to reach profitability by the end of this year based purely on its existing presence in Germany and the U.K. 

“For now, we are focused on those two countries but plan to expand to other European countries to become the leading healthcare job marketplace in Europe,” Roggendorf said. “But in the end, this is a global problem we are solving.”

Medwing’s Series C round included contributions from Northzone, Cathay Innovation, Cherry Ventures, Quadrille Capital, Atlantic Labs, Hambro Perks and — somewhat interestingly, given the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) fiasco over the past week — SVB Capital, the VC entity of SVB.

SVB Capital is not directly impacted by the collapsed bank, though their shared SVB Financial holding company parent is apparently in the process of selling its assets, including SVB Capital. We’re told that none of that impacts its cash outlay to Medwing though.