Eeshika Dadheech
There is a familiar picture of who belongs in venture capital: Former founders. Former bankers. Former consultants.
Nurses are individuals who spend their days making dozens of decisions that carry real consequences, often with incomplete information and very little margin for error. Despite this, they are rarely seen as natural participants in this group.
They are positioned as implementers rather than architects, operators rather than strategists. Essential to the system, but somehow separate from the rooms where long-term decisions about that system are made. This separation is not just outdated, it’s costly.
If venture capital is, at its core, the practice of identifying signals before the rest of the market catches on, then nurses may be among the most overlooked sources in healthcare today.
Nurses Are Already Making Investment Decisions
At the bedside, nurses are constantly allocating scarce resources: time, attention, emotional energy, clinical judgment. Some would argue, resources far more important than just the dollars in our pocket.
They decide which patient needs escalation now and which can wait. They balance protocol with intuition, efficiency with empathy. They make decisions knowing they won’t have perfect information, knowing that waiting too long or acting too quickly both carry risk.
This is investment thinking, even if it’s rarely labeled as such. The difference is simply the currency.
There is no room for abstraction at the bedside. If something doesn’t work in practice. If it slows care, adds friction, or introduces confusion, it fails immediately. Nurses internalize this reality early in their careers, and it shapes how they evaluate systems, tools, and decisions long before anyone hands them a term sheet.
The Cost of Distance in Healthcare Investing
In healthcare, capital often sits with those who understand markets but not medicine. Unlike technology—where most investors have personally used the products they fund—healthcare requires decisions about care made by individuals who may never encounter a patient. This missing perspective matters because healthcare is not simply a business optimization problem, but a care-centered system where lived clinical experience provides insight that cannot be simulated or outsourced.
They aren’t the ones documenting a patient’s progress at 3 a.m., troubleshooting broken workflows while families wait for answers, or feeling the quiet accumulation of small inefficiencies that slowly turn good intentions into burnout. And it turns out, that distance matters.
It’s how we end up with products that look elegant in demos but feel burdensome in practice. With tools that technically “solve” problems while creating three new ones downstream. With startups that underestimate how emotionally and operationally difficult adoption can be inside real clinical environments.
Nurses live at the exact point where strategy meets reality. They see what breaks, what bends, and what quietly gets worked around in order to keep patients safe. That perspective doesn’t replace traditional venture skills—it grounds them.
The case for nurses in venture capital is sometimes framed as a representation issue and while representation matters, this argument runs deeper than that.
Healthcare is unusually complex. It is regulated, emotional, deeply human, and operationally dense. The companies that endure in this space are not just technologically impressive—they earn trust. With nurses reportedly being the most trusted profession year after year, they understand how to build this trust. Not only from clinicians, patients, and families but anyone sitting in the boardroom.
For example, when a nurse’s hospital introduces a patient throughput incentive to reduce the length of a hospital stay, suddenly the pressure to quickly discharge patients and often unready families intensifies. Nurses find themselves fielding family concerns that haven’t been fully addressed, coordinating patient teaching which is rushed, and absorbing the emotional weight when a patient returns just a few days later. The incentive worked, the metric improved but the system paid the downstream cost. Nurses see how incentives don’t disappear– they migrate. And they learn to ask where that pressure will land next.
Nurses understand how policy decisions impact real people. How incentives ripple through care teams. How trust is built slowly and lost quickly. That lived understanding becomes a form of pattern recognition—one that no spreadsheet or market report can fully replicate.
What Changes When Nurses Are in the Room
When nurses participate in diligence conversations, the tone shifts. The questions become more specific, more grounded, more human.
Who is actually using this and at what point in their shift?
What happens when the unit is understaffed?
What workaround will emerge the moment this adds friction?
Which clinician ends up absorbing the hidden work this solution creates, and is that cost captured anywhere in the P&L?
What assumptions in the go-to-market model break first under real operational pressure?
These questions don’t always fit neatly into a pitch deck, but they often determine whether a company succeeds or quietly stalls after early enthusiasm fades.
Nurse-informed diligence doesn’t just reduce risk. It increases the likelihood of backing founders who understand care delivery as it actually exists, not as it is imagined from the outside.
From Bedside to Boardroom Is Not a Leap—It’s a Continuation
The future of healthcare investing will not be shaped solely by those who studied the system from the outside, it will be shaped by people who live inside it. Those who know that adoption is emotional and that proximity to care changes how you evaluate risk.
Nurses do not need to be invited into venture capital as a symbolic gesture. They belong there because they already possess one of the most valuable assets an investor can have: closeness to a source of truth.
At Nurse Capital, we see the path from bedside to boardroom not as a pivot, but as a natural progression and we believe healthcare will be better for it.
