A young Richmond tech startup looking to fill hospital staff vacancies is making long strides in 2019.
Kamana is a software platform connecting healthcare providers and staffing agencies with traveling nurses and other medical professionals. It competed in the 2019 Big Launch Challenge pitch competition in Danville, Va., before being picked to join this fall's Lighthouse Labs accelerator cohort and then winning the 757 Pitch competition in Norfolk.
That was just months after launching.
With 900 nurses onboarded in four months, Kamana is now looking to bring on its first customers to employ them. It has signed at least three staffing agencies as clients, and CEO Dave Dworschak said it plans to come out of Lighthouse with 10 to 15.
The team of four co-founders started working on the venture conceptually about a year ago.
On a visit to Alaska, Dworschak was watching travel nurse John Modica manage varying relationships with staffing agencies and processes for credentialing and paperwork, which he did every three months. They tried to find a software solution, but couldn’t.
“As we started getting a team together to create one ourselves, we dug into conversations with recruiters, staffers and health systems; and software and tools powering this $18 billion industry were built in 1999,” Dworschak said. “So we jumped in.”
The pair brought on Nick Toce, founder of Richmond design agency Helm & Hue, who created the Kamana brand and connected the team with its final co-founder, developer Kiere El-Shafie.
In May, the startup quietly launched its digital wallet for job seekers, where the documents needed for onboarding are kept on a mobile app. A month later, it had started developing the staffing agency side of the platform. After beta testing, an early version of the platform went live five weeks ago.
Kamana is free to candidates and charges a subscription for staffing agencies to use its management platform. It eventually plans to add a matching system for nurses and employers, where it would charge a transactional fee for placement.
“Now that we’ve launched the staffing agency side, the core focus is on them,” Dworschak said. “They implement this end-to-end candidate management portal, which will in turn bring users onto the platform.”
He said scaling the platform is something of a chicken-and-egg problem, but he’s confident both agencies and nurses will find enough value in it to become loyal users.
“The candidate is ultimately getting their hands on the product most, but staffing agencies are benefiting because we can cut their onboarding time from six days to a couple.”
