Nurse-assisting robotics firm Diligent raises $30M

By: Brian Heater

Nursing shortages were a problem well before our hospitals were rocked by a pandemic. Two years in and overloaded systems have further contributed to burnout, stress and other factors plaguing the people we rely on for our own well-being. We’ve seen robotics applied to just about every other field of late, so why not nursing — a field that will require one million new faces to keep up with demand in the U.S. alone?

Diligent has been leading that specific charge for some time now. Late last year, we spoke with University of Texas Austin associate professor Andrea Thomaz, who co-founded the company in 2017 with Vivian Chu, to discuss precisely how profound an impact the past two years have had on the firm. She noted, in part:

It is really just a dramatic shift in labor markets across a lot of different industries. It seems to be related both to people kind of having a great resignation, where people are deciding that they want to do different things. And a lot of people shifting jobs. We’re seeing that all across tech work, a lot in our industry and healthcare. A lot of people are just deciding to do something else. There were already workforce challenges pre-pandemic, and now those are reaching crisis levels.

To read the full article: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/12/nurse-assisting-robotics-firm-diligent-raises-30m/