Founders Everywhere: Ilana Borkenstein and Eric Gruskin
Ilana Borkenstein and Eric Gruskin are the co-founders of M7, a company on a mission to modernize nursing workforce management.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Nurses are the backbone of the healthcare system, playing a vital role in patient care, safety, and clinical operations. They are the largest sector of the healthcare workforce, yet the least invested in and the least technologized. This gap leaves nurses struggling with outdated systems and heavy workloads, contributing to high turnover rates that disrupt patient care, increase costs, and place an even greater strain on remaining staff. M7 Health is changing that and providing the technological layer health systems depend on to unlock the operational and organizational changes that the modern nurse demands. M7’s platform allows health systems to get to know their nurses like never before, enabling more customized work experiences that align with nurses’ personal needs and professional goals.
Co-founder and CEO Ilana Borkenstein began her career in healthcare consulting at Deloitte before transitioning to bedside and working as a registered nurse on a Bone Marrow Transplant unit called M7. (Yes, that’s where the company name was derived.) After working as a nurse, she decided to go back to school to get her MBA because she saw many opportunities for system-level improvements in nursing and wanted to explore entrepreneurial ideas to make nursing more sustainable and attractive. Ilana met her co-founder and COO Eric Gruskin at Harvard Business School where they were classmates. Eric comes from a family of healthcare providers and has expertise in digital transformation. They came together in a class called Startup Operations. What began as a project and shared interest area evolved into a company three years later. Ilana and Eric share how M7 is helping to manage and support the nursing workforce.
Their team is deeply mission-driven and as they grow, they’re actively hiring and looking for people who share a passion for improving the nursing profession. Apply here!
What is M7’s North Star?
Our North Star is making the nursing profession more sustainable for current nurses and more attractive for those considering entering the field. This ultimately leads to better patient outcomes and more stable healthcare systems.
What makes M7 a must-have vs a nice-to-have?
The high turnover rate among nurses has led to financial losses for health systems, forcing some to close services. That negatively impacts the health of our communities, especially in rural areas where healthcare facilities are more dispersed. Stabilizing the nursing workforce - and making the nursing profession more sustainable - is essential for providing safe patient care. M7 is a must-have solution for hospitals and healthcare systems because we offer a comprehensive data-driven platform to optimize nurse workforce utilization.
How does M7 inspire “customer love”?
Our users include nurses, ancillary staff, nurse managers, nursing supervisors, and hospital executives. Nurses regularly comment how obvious it is that the platform was built by and for nurses. M7 gives nurses a voice in the staffing and scheduling process - they can share their work-life needs and preferences and gain visibility into fair, equitable, and transparent staffing decisions. This contributes to higher job satisfaction and improved retention. The platform also offers executives valuable insights into staffing efficiency, productivity, workforce planning priorities and staff sentiment. Managers and supervisors benefit from a suite of real-time decision support tools that help them make better decisions shift-to-shift.
Tell us about some milestones that M7 has crushed.
We recently closed a $4 Million Seed Round to help scale the platform and continue to modernize nursing workforce management. But what we’re most proud of is that we have more than 10x’d our customer base in a year. We will also be announcing a new and exciting partnership in 2025.
Any lessons you’ve learned along the way of building M7?
Expedite the pace of decision making - and of good decision making - by getting opinions and advice from people who have done it before. Those people don’t necessarily need to be advisors or team members. We’ve found advice and support from people who are simply intrigued by what we’re doing and willing to take a call. There are a lot of people like that out there!
Fun facts:
Ilana: I spent a summer in Kenya doing public health work during college, where two babies were named after me.
Eric: I was the student manager of the Michigan football team during undergrad, which has really helped translate to rallying our internal team around a shared mission.
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