Saile raises $2.2M to use AI agents to fix healthcare staffing and cut physician credentialing from months to days

Hospitals across the U.S. are spending heavily to recruit temporary physicians, flying doctors across state lines to fill staffing gaps. At the same time, thousands of qualified physicians remain in limbo for months, unable to work due to credentialing paperwork, compliance reviews, and slow onboarding processes.

New York startup Saile thinks artificial intelligence can fix that.

The physician-founded healthcare staffing startup announced Thursday it has raised a $2.2 million oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Matchstick Ventures, with participation from Headwater Ventures. The company is emerging from stealth with more than 5,000 physicians already on its platform, including doctors affiliated with major healthcare systems such as NYU Langone, Northwell Health, Mass General, Cedars-Sinai, and Hospital for Special Surgery.

Saile’s pitch is simple: hospitals don’t necessarily have a doctor shortage problem. They have a movement problem.

Doctors can spend 90 to 120 days getting credentialed every time they move between hospitals, telemedicine platforms, ambulatory centers, or consulting roles. That process often requires repeating the same background checks, license verifications, onboarding documents, and compliance reviews.

For physicians trying to pick up extra shifts or move between care settings, the delays can become exhausting. For hospitals, the bottleneck creates staffing gaps that push them toward expensive staffing agencies and temporary labor contracts.

“Most people assume the issue in healthcare staffing is a lack of doctors, but what we’ve seen is something different. There’s a large, underutilized workforce that simply can’t move between systems efficiently,” said Marc Ayoub, Co-Founder of Saile and Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Donald & Barbara Zucker School of Medicine. “We’re building the infrastructure that sits in between, so a physician who is already vetted in one system doesn’t have to start from zero every time they want to work somewhere new.”

Founded by Ayoub and a former Cedar engineer, Saile built what it calls a “universal credential passport,” a portable profile that stores and maintains verified physician credentials across multiple healthcare systems and job types. Instead of restarting the onboarding process for every opportunity, doctors can carry their verified records between employers and care settings.

Under the hood, the platform uses five AI agents focused on recruiting, onboarding, credentialing, staffing, and compliance. The company says the system can reduce credentialing timelines from months to days.

That timing matters for hospitals under pressure to fill shifts quickly. Healthcare systems across the country are still dealing with staffing shortages years after the pandemic reshaped labor patterns across the industry. Physician burnout, administrative overload, and growing demand for temporary staffing have pushed hospitals to rely heavily on third-party agencies, often at high cost.

Saile wants to position itself beneath that entire process.

“What Marc and Taylor are building isn’t a new staffing agency, it’s the infrastructure layer beneath every staffing decision in healthcare,” said Ryan Broshar, Partner at Matchstick Ventures.

The startup says it has seen provider volume double over the past six months, with more than 1,000 job posts and over 1,000 weekly provider engagements generated organically through the platform.

Saile currently operates across telemedicine, urgent care, ambulatory surgery centers, consulting networks, AI training labs, and acute care hospitals. The new funding will go toward expanding its AI infrastructure, marketplace operations, and healthcare platform integrations.