Gento — formerly known as Nursing Without Walls — has received $5 million in Series A funding from Palisades Growth Capital to continue expanding its on-demand staffing and care management services.

Founded in 2016, the Los Angeles-based Gento provides staffing solutions for home-based care providers and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) alike. The company, which has seen steady growth since launching, provides an online and app-based marketplace where nurses and therapists looking for per diem work can find opportunities.

Gento’s mission: to partner with home-based care providers to deploy workers in an efficient manner.

The $5 million from Palisades brings Gento’s fundraising total to over $7 million thus far, CEO and co-founder Victor Gajendran told Home Health Care News.

“This funding poured fuel onto the fire. That’s how I like to describe it,” Gajendran said. “We are having a lot of [growing] pains, but it’s a good type of problem for any startup to have. This enabled us to expand deeper in the existing markets and to launch in new markets.”

Before Gento, Gajendran was most recently the vice president of tech operations at Ticketmaster. Before that, he was the senior director of tech at Zynx Health, a Los Angeles- based company that specializes in evidence-based clinical decision support system solutions.

Currently, Gento has over 5,000 clinicians on its platform. On the home health side, they do about 1,200 visits per week, according to Gento.

As a company that connects agencies to per diem workers, Gento’s services may soon become more popular in the home health setting. As a response to the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) and its changes to therapy reimbursement, many providers have shifted their staffing mix to more PRN positions.

“We pretty much try to remove ourselves by using technology and connecting the providers and the clinicians,” Gajendran said.

Gento did not share any revenue specifics, but the number of visits and clinicians are an indication of its growth, Gajendran said. The company nearly doubled last year and about tripled the year before that, he noted.

Jeff Anderson, a partner at Palisades with over 20 years of private equity experience, is bullish on Gento’s abilities in the ever-evolving world of home-based care.

“Gento has been consistently growing,” Anderson said in a statement. “In a vastly changing regulatory landscape, Gento is providing highly cost-effective solutions to the growing in-home health care market.”

Gento sees staffing as the biggest problem in the health care space; it hopes to solve that problem through technology and by creating care delivery management solutions. On its platform, it provides access to all of the types of professional workers a patient would need to be treated — nurses, a variety of therapists and social workers.

“After [they are connected], we carry it forward all the way through to completion,” Gajendran said. “And we produce billable materials back to the home health agency so that they can go on running their business, rest assured that the patients are taken care of.”

The global health care staffing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5.2% from 2019 to 2026, reaching the market value of around $45.2 billion by 2026, according to a 2019 report from Acumen Research and Consulting.

Overall, Gento has facilitated over 75,000 visits and wants to streamline staffing in the home. Whether its platform is powerful enough to change the industry is yet to be seen, but the $5 million in funding should provide a considerable boost either way.