We are excited to announce that Matchstick Ventures has completed an investment in Saile, an AI-powered healthcare workforce marketplace built to help health systems regain control of staffing while giving clinicians greater flexibility and autonomy. Healthcare is facing a structural labor crisis: a projected shortage of more than 100,000 physicians by 2026, widespread provider burnout, and an over reliance on expensive, inefficient staffing agencies. At the same time, clinicians increasingly expect portable credentials, transparent pay, and the ability to work flexible, local shifts. Despite these pressures, staffing and credentialing workflows remain fragmented, manual, and slow, leading to 120-day onboarding cycles,60% agency premiums, and hospitals losing up to $10,000 per day per vacant seat. Saile is emerging at a moment when health systems want to bring labor back in-house, providers want control over how they work, and the underlying technology finally exists to support both.

Saile unifies sourcing, credentialing, compliance, and scheduling into a single AI-driven marketplace that precisely matches pre-vetted clinicians with open shifts. On the demand side, Saile serves healthcare facilities ranging from outpatient surgical centers to large health systems; on the supply side, it supports a growing, liquid workforce of physicians and advanced practice providers seeking flexible income opportunities. By giving clinicians a portable “credentialing passport” and enabling facilities to deploy internal staff first, then seamlessly extend to trusted external providers, Saile replaces agency-driven, low-trust workflows with a predictable, local, and data-driven staffing model. The platform’s defensibility comes from proprietary credentialing and matching data, deep integrations with facility systems and VMS platforms, and growing switching costs as Saile becomes embedded in core workforce operations. Early traction includes 1,500+ providers onboarded organically, 18 pilot facilities in NYC, multiple MSAs, and partnerships with VMS providers and telemedicine companies.

Saile is led by co-founders Marc Ayoub and Taylor Hakes, who bring a rare combination of clinical credibility, healthcare operations insight, and technical execution. Marc is a practicing physician who experienced these credentialing and staffing bottlenecks firsthand, including being unable to access local shifts due to onboarding delays after fellowship. The founding team has lived the problem they are solving and understands the regulatory, compliance, and workflow complexity of healthcare labor. Supported by advisors from leading healthcare organizations and staffing agencies, the team is uniquely positioned to build the operating layer that allows healthcare systems to own, not outsource, their workforce. We’re excited to partner with Saile as they work to become the default staffing engine for healthcare organizations, starting with a focused wedge in surgical and outpatient settings and expanding from there.

Why we’re excited about Saile:

This is a founder-problem fit in a market that is larger and more dynamic than it appears from the outside.Marc has lived the friction of credentialing and shift work firsthand, and it shows. He understands theregulatory and operational complexity cold, but more importantly, he has the intensity and urgency to buildthrough it. Doctors are already behaving the way Saile assumes they will. Four in ten physicians reportpicking up shifts outside their primary hospital, and Marc believes the real number doing extra work insidetheir own systems is materially higher. This is a massive, unstructured labor market hiding in plain sight.The blocker everywhere is credentialing, with some systems employing dozens of people just to manageit. By owning that workflow, Saile becomes the control point for everything that follows.

What starts as a shift marketplace can evolve into the central operating layer for how clinicians earn incremental income, whether through local shifts, tele-health, case consults, or even emerging AI-related work. The product is simple, the pain is acute, and the current alternatives are expensive and inefficient.There is execution risk, as with any company tackling healthcare infrastructure, but if Marc can channel his energy into building a focused, durable platform, the upside is significant. This is the type of asymmetric bet we like to make: real problem, authentic founder, and a wedge that can expand into something much larger.

‍

‍