When Mary Kathleen Bryan went back to school to become a nurse, she took a job as a travel nurse recruiter to learn the business. What she saw from the inside changed her direction. Temporary healthcare staffing, she realized, was built to profit from healthcare professionals rather than support them.
RuraLink, is her answer: a rural healthcare workforce marketplace where healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals connect directly. For rural hospitals, that means lower contract labor costs and less dependence on agencies. For clinicians, it means negotiating their own rates and building independent careers. Underneath both is one goal: a stable workforce for the communities that rely on rural hospitals for essential care.
What led you to become a founder?
In 2015, I was at a career crossroads. I decided to go back to school for a nursing degree, which I had always wanted to do. While I finished my prerequisites, I started working as a travel nurse recruiter at a small, family-owned agency in Oregon. I had a background in sales, territory management, and HR operations, so it made sense to earn some money and learn the business from the inside.
In less than a year, a national agency recruited me to run an entire branch. As a branch manager, you get access to a lot more information, and that is when I saw how the industry really worked.
I come from an entrepreneurial family. Where I grew up, you build a business and run it yourself. I didn't know what a founder was, or that people invested in companies, until I started building software. In 2022, we received our first accelerator funding, and that opened up a whole new world.
What problem were you seeing that others weren't talking about?
The structure of temporary healthcare staffing is extremely flawed. It treats healthcare professionals like a commodity that can be cut loose, when the industry wouldn't exist without them. And it is opaque on purpose.
So I started consulting with healthcare professionals one-on-one, showing them how the industry worked and how they could build direct relationships with hospitals. That grew into an educational platform, and then into a self-paced online course. That course became our Clinician Entrepreneurship Program, which walks healthcare professionals through setting up and running their own business.
From there, I realized that a technology platform managing the relationship between healthcare professionals and healthcare organizations could benefit both sides. I built the first version on a white-label platform, bootstrapped.
Rural healthcare was at the heart of the mission from the start. Rural hospitals face a different set of problems, and I watched closures start to climb again years before it became national news.
How has RuraLink grown since you started?
We started bootstrapped. Our pre-seed funding, more than $300,000, came through accelerator programs, including the Bronze Valley Investment Accelerator in Alabama. We also received grants, including two from the Maine Technology Institute and one from the Roux Institute.
This year, we renamed the company from EmpoweRx to RuraLink. When we started, our goal was to help rural healthcare organizations connect directly with healthcare professionals and reduce their dependence on costly staffing agencies. As we grew, we saw we were building something bigger: stronger connections that help rural healthcare communities thrive. Our name changed, but our mission hasn't.
The landscape has changed a lot since our first round. The way early-stage investors invest, and what they look for, has shifted dramatically. That has been hard on workforce companies in particular. Everyone wants to talk about the future of work, but few investors understand how difficult it is to displace the incumbents in this space. As a founder, you're forced to become a realist, even if you start out as an optimist.
Heading into the last part of the year and 2027, our focus is partnerships and revenue. We recently announced a government contracting partnership with Winding Creek Wellness, a First Nations-owned organization. Our first government contract is also in post-award.
What do you wish someone had told you early on as an entrepreneur?
Before you get involved in the investor ecosystem, validate your idea. Not for anybody else. For yourself.
I took years to prove this idea to myself, and that gave me a foundation. When the storms come, you'll hear from naysayers and get a million questions from people who have no information about what you're doing. That foundation is what carries you.
If you can't prove it to yourself, so that you still believe in it on the hard days, nobody else is going to get on board.
Thank you, Mary Kathleen, for sharing your story and the vision behind RuraLink.
