Building in the times of change is both a blessing and a curse. There are so many problems to solve – yet so many variables changing at every step of the journey, making long-term plans and projections increasingly obsolete.
This has happened to us, too. Just as we seemingly found our perfect product-market fit, things took a turn that’s making us pivot – or wait out.
Here’s our story (albeit fairly typical for the startups of our everchanging time).
What We’ve Been Building
imii i is an AI-powered platform built to help people integrate faster when they move to a new country. It reduces the time it takes to secure housing, navigate healthcare and banking, and access services that make daily life possible. Our immediate goal has always been simple: to help newcomers feel at home and productive sooner.
Our vision was bolder: to create (or at least to do our small bit for) a more global, equal and welcoming world where people move around – whether by choice or by need – with dignity.
Why And How We Ran Into Healthcare
When we explored where to prove the value of imii as a viable business opportunity, healthcare stood out. After all, few sectors in the UK (and beyond) benefit from migrant workforce as much. The NHS heavily depends on international talent.
However, integration challenges and churn turned out to be vert real. Every year, around 9,000 foreign nurses exit the NHS, and replacing them costs approximately £10,000 each. That’s £90 million annually in turnover costs alone.
Of course, there are plenty reasons with NHS that cause staff to leave. It would be wild to narrow it down solely to integration, But it does account for one of the factors influencing this decisions – which is evidenced by surveys.
So we thought, what if we could help even a small fraction of healthcare workers to feel more settled, more comfortable, happier in their new home? Even if Imii helped just 5% of nurses feel settled enough to stay – just 5 out of 100, which doesn’t seem unrealistic at all – the NHS could save £4.5 million per year.
So for us, healthcare wasn’t a sector pivot. It was a proving ground: if we could show Imii worked in such a complex, high-stakes environment, we could show it worked anywhere else.
Our First B2B Pilot
Of course, we knew we’d have no luck approaching NHS right away. That would just be shootingshootng ourselves in the foot. Public healthcare is slow, bureaucratic, and very competitive with innovators – we’d spend years in the queue for the slightest opportunity to pilot.
So we went to their hiring contractors instead. Originally, we started our outreach just to validate our assumptions – we weren’t even trying to sell our solution, which we deemed being nowhere close to the finished product. We still called it an MVP – a fraction of our vision.
But somehow, that fraction turned out to be good enough for what we were offering.
Over the course of our outreach, we ran into a healthcare recruitment agency that had some familiarity with the products of our close competitors. They already knew the value of our offering, and genuinely missed having a simple and affordable solution delivering it.
So we partnered up for our first B2B pilot to help onboard a small cohort of international nurses into regional UK hospitals.
The challenges faced by them were familiar:
- Finding safe, affordable housing near their assigned hospital.
- Understanding UK systems — banking, council tax, GP registration.
- Navigating transport in unfamiliar towns.
- Accessing trusted services in a completely new environment.
We adapted Imii’s platform to meet those needs:
- A tailored AI assistant answering practical questions with location-specific guidance.
- Regional content packs with onboarding checklists, rental guides, and neighbourhood tips.
- Links to trusted partner services, from credit-building to legal advice.
What Happened
The feedback from the cohort was encouraging.
- Nurses reported feeling more confident and less overwhelmed during their first weeks.
- They used Imii to secure housing, register with GPs, and find their way around new towns faster.
- Managers shared that it made their own jobs easier, reducing the number of basic queries they had to field.
On our side, it was validation: the product solved the problem it was designed for.
But there was one problem.
The Macro Factor
As we all know, in 2025, UK immigration policy shifted sharply. Pathways for carers have been closed completely, nursing recruitment slowed – and the recruitment agencies have been impacted heavily, too. Their recruitment volumes dropped dramatically. Which meant two things:
- Their own business was affected, forcing them to cut down costs
- The cohorts they now recruit are small enough for them to manage manually.
This meant that our product was no longer a “must have”, but a “nice to have” – at the time when our customers simply didn’t have extra resources for that.
While we truly believe that our product would actually allow to cut integration costs – let alone decrease the risk of attrition which is net positive for healthcare providers, it was perceived as an expense on top of the current manual integration efforts – and as such not something that recruiting companies or their customers could afford at this point in time.
Everyone involved agreed that Imii added value. But with recruitment volumes down, no one was in a position to scale adoption.
What We Decided to Do Next
The slowdown in healthcare recruitment is unlikely to be permanent. Once the system feels the impact of current policies, the volumes will return. When they do, integration will matter more than ever.
But that might take six, twelve, or even more months. And we had to make a choice.
- Freeze the company and wait.
- Pivot to corporate relocation tools for tech and STEM — a market already crowded, and one we were never too passionate about.
- Or find a new direction entirely.
Giving up was not on the table. Waiting felt too close to giving up. And building a boring corporate tool was never going to get me through the day.
So we chose the harder path: a new direction.
Healthcare remains firmly on our radar, because international recruitment will come back. When it does, we’ll be ready with proof that integration saves money, boosts retention, and improves lives.
But for now, our focus has shifted to another area within immigration — one where demand is immediate, and where we believe Imii can make a lasting difference.
Because yes, the immigration market is a hell of a challenge. But challenges are exactly why we’re here.
Where we’re going next?
Stay tuned to find out.
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