For some entrepreneurs, innovation is born not from ambition alone, but from heartbreak. For Dubai-based Indian-origin 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 healthcare hiring revolution 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 leukaemia in a hospital bed in London. At 32, she was an Oxford-educated lawyer, one of the smartest people in his circle and was fighting cancer with the help of chemotherapy for the past five months in one of London’s top hospitals. While she was able to beat the disease, the NHS soon asked her to vacate her bed due to workforce shortages. Two days before she was supposed to return to work at IMMO Capital, a real estate platform she founded with Nigam, she died from a lung infection. It wasn’t cancer that beat her, it was a healthcare system that couldn’t provide a patient with optimal post-treatment care.
Finding formidable healthcare
This is what pushed Nigam to found his third venture, TERN Group and secure a funding of $24 million in Series A funding in September 2025. The problem, he figured out, wasn’t limited to the UK, but spread across the globe. The shortage of healthcare workers is projected to reach 85 million by 2030, with 20 million of those in healthcare and social care. Thus, in 2023, TERN Group launched an AI-powered global talent mobility platform which he described as AI-Native. It secured $30 million in annualised revenue within 24 months and onboarded over 650,000 professionals. TERN’s AI interviewing system can assess 28 different attributes across 80 specialised nursing roles. The platform has achieved 96%+ retention rates for placed healthcare workers and 88% conversion rates from resume to job offer. Most impressively, it cuts international healthcare hiring timelines from 6-12 months to under 10 weeks.
Revolutionising the UAE’s healthcare
TERN has risen to attract national attention. The company now competes with giants like Palantir for government-level workforce assessment contracts. It is catering to a sector that needs attention in major economies. The demand is significant. The UAE healthcare sector is projected to spend over $50 billion by 2029 whereas Germany requires 40,000-50,000 nurses annually. This is where TERN comes in with ethical recruitment standards, zero-cost training and placement for healthcare workers. In the UAE, TERN’s system is helping hire nurses for Emirates Health Services (EHS) which operates 134 hospitals and health centres, stated a report by Gulf News. It conducts AI interviews, evaluates clinical reasoning and identifies top candidates, all remotely. Not only this, but the platform also helps track professional growth over time, aiding 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 allowing sellers to receive instant bids 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 that healthcare systems are staffed not just quickly, but sustainably.
