For some entrepreneurs, innovation is born not from ambition alone, but from heartbreak. For Dubai-based Indian-born founder Avinav Nigam, it was the loss of a close friend that exposed the fragility of global healthcare systems and set him on a path to change them.
Today, Nigam is leading a revolution in healthcare recruitment in the UAE through his AI-powered platform, under his venture TERN Group.
A tragedy that struck a chord
In 2022, Nigam watched his colleague fight leukemia in a hospital bed in London. She was thirty-two, an Oxford-educated lawyer, one of the smartest people in his circle, and had been fighting cancer with the help of chemotherapy for the past five months in one of London’s best hospitals. While she was able to overcome the illness, the NHS soon asked her to vacate her bed due to a lack of manpower. Two days before she was due to return to work at IMMO Capital, a real estate platform she founded with Nigam, she died of a lung infection. It was not the cancer that defeated her, but rather the health care system that was unable to provide optimal care for the patient after treatment.
Find great healthcare
This is what prompted Nigam to found his third venture, TERN Group and secure $24 million in Series A funding in September 2025. He discovered that the problem was not limited to the UK, but had spread around the world.
The shortage of healthcare workers is expected to reach 85 million by 2030, of which 20 million will be in healthcare and social care. Thus, in 2023, TERN Group launched an AI-powered global talent mobility platform that it described as native AI. It generated $30 million in annual revenue within 24 months and included more than 650,000 professionals. TERN’s AI-powered interviewing system can assess 28 different attributes across 80 specialist nursing roles.
The platform has achieved retention rates of over 96% for healthcare workers and 88% resume-to-job offer conversion rates.
Even more impressive is that it reduces international healthcare staffing timelines from 6-12 months to as little as 10 weeks.
Revolutionizing healthcare in the United Arab Emirates
TERN has risen to national attention. The company is now competing with giants like Palantir for government-level workforce evaluation contracts. It caters to a sector that needs attention in major economies. The demand is great. The UAE’s healthcare sector is expected to spend more than $50 billion by 2029, while Germany needs between 40,000 and 50,000 nurses annually. This is where TERN comes in with its ethical hiring standards, training and no-cost placement for healthcare workers. In the UAE, the TERN system is helping to recruit nurses for Emirates Health Services (EHS), which runs 134 hospitals and health centres, according to a report by Gulf News.
It conducts interviews using artificial intelligence, assesses clinical reasoning and identifies the best candidates, all remotely. Not only that, the platform also helps track professional growth over time, assist nurses in planning careers and developing leadership skills.
TERN marks Nigam’s third major entrepreneurial venture. An IIT Bombay alumnus, he previously co-founded Cars24 in India, a digital marketplace that allows sellers to receive instant quotes from dealers – now valued at $3.2 billion. He later moved to the UK to launch IMMO Capital, Europe’s first technology-driven single-family residential investment platform.Now, with TERN, Nigam is focused on solving what he sees as one of the world’s most pressing challenges – ensuring healthcare systems are staffed not just quickly, but sustainably.
