Ascend Learning, a healthcare education and technology company owned by funds managed by Blackstone and CPP Investments, has acquired M7 Health, a startup that uses AI to build hospital staff schedules and fill open shifts. HIT Consultant reported the deal on September 21, 2026.
Financial terms were not disclosed. M7 will sit alongside Ascend's other workforce products, StaffGarden and Laudio. According to HIT Consultant, the combination creates one platform covering clinical education, credentialing, competency management, frontline leadership and shift deployment.
M7 was founded and is led by chief executive Ilana Borkenstein, a registered nurse with an MBA. Neither company said whether M7 would keep its brand or what role its founders would take inside Ascend.
What M7 Health built
M7's software is used by academic medical centres, community hospitals and rural hospitals across the US. Built by frontline nurses to replace scheduling spreadsheets and older workforce tools, it forecasts patient demand on each unit, balances rosters automatically and matches open shifts to nurses based on clinical skills, fatigue rules and personal scheduling preferences. It can also recruit a hospital's own staff to fill gaps before managers turn to outside agencies.
The platform works alongside existing HR, payroll and timekeeping systems such as UKG Kronos and Workday. The company reports that customers cut administrative scheduling time by more than 60%, reduced nurse turnover by 30% and cut spending on premium and travel staff by 35% to 40%, with a return on investment within 90 days of going live. These figures are the company's own and were not independently verified.
The founders and the funding
M7 announced a $4 million seed round led by First Round Capital in September 2024. In July 2025 it raised a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, with First Round, 25m Health and Lakehouse also investing, according to the company's blog.
M7 did not disclose its founding year, headquarters, headcount or number of hospital customers at the time of the sale.
Why Ascend is buying
Ascend is best known for training future clinicians. Its ATI Nursing Education business reaches more than 60% of US nursing schools, and its National Healthcare Association certifies more than 245,000 allied health professionals each year. Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board agreed to buy the company in April 2017 from funds advised by Providence Equity Partners and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan.
Since then Ascend has moved into software for working clinicians. In October 2024 it bought StaffGarden, a cloud platform that digitises clinical ladder programmes, competency assessments and peer reviews and was used by more than 800 hospitals at the time. Laudio, which Ascend added in 2025, automates tasks for nurse managers such as rounding, staff recognition and team huddles.
HIT Consultant described the four parts as a workforce lifecycle: education and licensure preparation, qualification through StaffGarden, engagement through Laudio and deployment through M7. In that model a hospital could schedule nurses using their certifications, career goals and burnout risk as well as their availability, the publication said.
A founder-led strategy at Ascend
Ascend is run by chief executive Lissy Hu, who took the job in October 2024, the same month she left WellSky, Managed Healthcare Executive reported. Hu founded care coordination company CarePort Health in 2012; it was later acquired by Allscripts and then by WellSky for $1.35 billion. Her career has focused on healthcare workforce problems such as staff shortages and more complex patient needs.
Since late 2024, Ascend has bought StaffGarden, Laudio and now M7, each of which serves nurses and nurse managers already working in hospitals rather than students. Ascend is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, and trains about 300,000 nursing students a year, according to Managed Healthcare Executive.
HIT Consultant contrasted Ascend's approach with staffing vendors that treat scheduling as a stand-alone logistics problem. By owning the scheduling software, Ascend can connect the training and credential records it already holds to decisions about which nurse works which shift.
