TERN Group Raises £4.3M to Build AI-Powered Infrastructure for Global Healthcare Workforce Mobility
July 1, 2024
TERN Group, the London-headquartered clinical AI workforce platform, raised £4.3M in early-stage funding to build the technology and operational infrastructure needed to solve one of healthcare’s most intractable problems: the sustainable supply of qualified clinical staff across international borders. The round was led by early believers in the team’s vision of replacing broken, bureaucratic international recruitment with a purpose-built AI system.
The workforce crisis in global healthcare is both immediate and structural. The World Health Organisation projects a shortfall of 18 million healthcare workers by 2030, driven by ageing populations across high-income countries, insufficient domestic training pipelines, and rising demand for care. In the UK alone, the NHS spends over £10 billion annually on locum and agency staff — a figure that reflects not the solution to the problem but its symptom. Healthcare providers are forced to fill gaps with temporary and expensive labour because the systems for identifying, training, credentialising, and relocating qualified international professionals are fragmented, opaque, and painfully slow. Nurses from India, nurses from the Philippines, and care workers from across the globe are often willing and able to fill these roles — but the pathway from qualified professional to placed clinician can take two to three years and cost individuals the equivalent of £15,000-£25,000 in fees and preparation costs.
TERN Group was founded in 2023 by Avinav Nigam and Krishna Ramkumar, both second-time entrepreneurs who experienced the complexities of relocation and global talent mobility first-hand. Their platform is designed to handle the full stack of international healthcare recruitment: sourcing candidates from a growing pool of professionals across 13 countries, credentialling and verifying qualifications to meet local regulatory standards, providing language and cultural training, managing visa applications, and supporting post-arrival settlement. TERN operates on an ethics-first model, charging employers rather than candidates, and offering transparent, direct access to roles for healthcare workers who might otherwise fall prey to unscrupulous recruitment agents.
Early traction was rapid. By the time of this raise, TERN had already established partnerships with NHS trusts and care groups and demonstrated that its platform could reduce time-to-hire by 60% while significantly cutting per-placement costs compared to traditional staffing agencies. The platform’s AI-driven matching and compliance automation layer — built by clinicians, HR experts, and machine learning engineers — gave it a structural advantage over legacy recruiters that rely on manual processes and bilateral broker relationships.
The £4.3M was deployed to build the engineering team, deepen the platform’s AI capabilities, and establish TERN’s first international markets. The company would go on to raise a $24M Series A led by Notion Capital in September 2025, by which point it had expanded to six markets — Germany, the UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and the USA — and was supporting over 650,000 registered healthcare professionals and more than 100 institutional clients including 18 NHS Trusts.
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