How Stepful built an AI trade school for healthcare
Key points
Key takeaways from a YC Root Access interview with Stepful co-founders Carl Madi (CEO) and Tressia Hobeika (CPO), recorded just after closing a $55M Series C led by Oak HC/FT (October 2026):
Two customers, one pipeline. Stepful sells to students who pay to train into jobs like medical assistant, and to healthcare systems that use its platform to upskill their own hires — Mount Sinai, for example, trains people from its local community into patient care technicians.
Enterprise traction. Stepful has closed around 39 healthcare system contracts and now works with seven of the ten largest US health systems, including Providence and Mount Sinai.
Land-and-expand in action. One system started with a roughly $150k pilot covering ~10 nurses and grew into a seven-figure contract in under a year, with a roadmap to triple it again next year.
The market math. US health systems spend about $100B a year on staffing agencies and recruiting while carrying 1M+ open roles a year — and one in four Americans earns under $17/hr, so supply never meets demand.
10x cheaper, five months not two years. Traditional community college and trade-school paths cost up to $20k and take two years, disconnected from employers; Stepful's AI-driven training is roughly 10x cheaper and finishes in about five months, linked directly to hiring.
AI-native learning. Students practise with AI preceptors that can see and hear them (e.g. drawing blood), get an AI tutor that breaks down difficult concepts, and receive daily feedback so they arrive practice-ready.
Training where workers live. Instead of commuting to a city campus, Stepful sets up training inside partner health systems — keeping would-be nurses in rural communities and building supply across urban and rural America.
Scaling vision. With around 1.3M US healthcare jobs to fill and 30,000 students trained last year, the plan is to roughly 4x student numbers and add longer, more expensive programmes: 100,000 people at about $10k each is close to $1B in revenue — under 7% of the US market.
Read more: Watch on YouTube — YC Root Access
