Avinav Nigam and TERN Group: Building Businesses Around Life-Changing Decisions
How the serial entrepreneur created $10 billion in value by targeting moments when consumers make their biggest commitments
In a London hospital bed in late 2022, Avinav Nigam watched his colleague fight leukemia. She was 32, an Oxford-educated lawyer, and one of the smartest people he knew. After five months of chemotherapy at one of London’s top hospitals, she beat the cancer. But then the NHS asked her to vacate her bed due to workforce shortages.
Two days before she was expected to return to work at IMMO Capital, the real estate platform Nigam had co-founded, she died from a lung infection. Not from cancer, but from a system so starved of healthcare workers that it couldn’t provide basic post-treatment care.
This personal tragedy became the catalyst for Nigam’s third company, TERN Group, which just raised $24 million in Series A funding in September 2025. But the story begins much earlier, with a pattern Nigam discovered while building businesses worth over $10 billion in combined enterprise value.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Pattern: Life-Changing Decisions
Standing at a Gurgaon petrol pump in 2015, Nigam and his team approached car owners filling their tanks with an unusual question: “Would you like to sell your car?” The responses ranged from confused stares to accusations of attempted theft. This was the humble beginning of Cars24, now valued at $3.2 billion.
To be able to buy a used car for an aspiring Indian middle-class person is a life-changing decision. It’s a very hard, very difficult decision. It can often be a year, two years, five years in the making.
The insight wasn’t just about cars. Nigam had identified a category of businesses that intersect with consumers during their most significant moments: buying a car, purchasing a home, or moving to a new country for work. These decisions share common characteristics - they’re infrequent, emotionally charged, complex, and involve substantial trust deficits.
At Cars24, where Nigam served as a key leader until the company reached $250 million in revenue, the team discovered that supply constraints drove the entire category. Unlike typical retail marketplaces where demand is the bottleneck, in life-changing decisions, the company that controls supply controls the market.
The model worked. Cars24 built a live auction system where sellers could receive instant offers while sipping tea in the store. By the time a customer finished their refreshment, their car had already been sold to one of thousands of dealers bidding on the platform. The company reduced inventory holding from months to days, and eventually to near-instantaneous transactions.
Scaling the Model: IMMO Capital’s $2.5 Billion Bet
After leaving Cars24, Nigam moved to the UK and applied the same C2B (consumer-to-business) model to residential real estate. The problem was identical: institutional investors like Blackstone and pension funds wanted to deploy billions into European residential real estate, but couldn’t access 98% of the market due to fragmentation.
How do I deploy 500 million in German real estate? It’s just not possible today because cities have grown organically. Any new development opportunity is going to be in tier four locations.
IMMO Capital created Europe’s first technology-driven single family residential investment platform. The company raised $75 million in Series B funding in 2022, the largest proptech Series B in Europe at that time, and secured $2.5 billion in capital commitments from institutional investors.
The business model proved even more lucrative than Cars24. IMMO operated with 70%+ gross margins, earning fees across the entire value chain: acquisition fees, mortgage origination, renovation management, property management, and portfolio management.
It’s almost like a SaaS business in the real world.
Using AI and machine learning, IMMO’s team could assess over 250 data points per property and generate instant offers. They reduced the property underwriting process from days to minutes, enabling the kind of programmatic real estate investment that had been impossible in Europe’s fragmented markets.
The AI-Native Healthcare Platform
But it was the personal tragedy in London that drove Nigam to his most ambitious venture yet. The healthcare workforce crisis that killed his colleague wasn’t isolated to the UK. The global shortage of healthcare workers is projected to reach 85 million by 2030, with 20 million of those in healthcare and social care.
Meanwhile, India has doubled its capacity for nursing and medical college seats in the past five years, creating one of the world’s largest oversupplies of healthcare talent. The problem isn’t supply or demand, it’s the broken systems connecting them.
You’ve essentially got a fragmented supply of talent in markets like India and Africa, Central Asia, Philippines, Latin America. India being one of the most well positioned, but also poorly positioned in a different way. While you’ve got the biggest shortage that we have ever seen in skilled workers on the planet.
TERN Group launched in 2023 as an AI-powered global talent mobility platform. In just 24 months, the company reached 250 crore ($30 million) in annualized revenue and onboarded over 650,000 professionals to its platform. The September 2025 Series A round, led by Notion Capital with participation from EQ2 Ventures and RTP Global, will fuel expansion across Europe and the Gulf.
Building AI-Native Companies
What sets TERN apart isn’t just its mission, but how it’s built. Nigam calls it an “AI-native company,” where every team member must learn to perform their tasks with AI or find another job.
The marginal cost of dev is heading to zero. The constraint is human imagination. The constraint is not dev. The constraint is imagination.
This philosophy has led to a radical shift in team composition. While traditional tech companies maintain a 1:8 or 1:10 ratio of product managers to engineers, TERN targets 1:0.5. Product managers function as mini-CEOs, using AI tools to build and test features before engineers implement the final 20% for scaling and infrastructure.
The approach extends to their core product. TERN’s AI interviewing system can assess 28 different attributes across 80 specialized 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.
AI is not replacing humans, but AI is replacing humans that don’t use AI. It’s not coming, it’s here. This is bigger than the internet and faster.
Competing at Government Scale
TERN’s success has attracted attention beyond traditional recruitment. The company now competes with defense contractor Palantir for government-level workforce assessment contracts. One European government wants TERN to create a national talent quality filter for healthcare professionals from 70+ countries.
The stakes are enormous. The UAE healthcare sector alone is projected to spend over $50 billion by 2029. Germany needs 40,000-50,000 nurses annually. These aren’t staffing problems - they’re infrastructure challenges requiring system-level solutions.
We are building the infrastructure that makes global healthcare careers faster, fairer, and fully transparent.
TERN operates under strict ethical recruitment standards, providing zero-cost training and placement for healthcare workers. The company makes money from employers, not job seekers, flipping the traditional model where desperate workers pay thousands to immigration agents.
The Compounded Company Theory
Nigam’s three ventures illustrate what he calls “compounded companies” - businesses built around a core engine with multiple concentric value circles. For TERN, the core is international healthcare recruitment, but the company is expanding into workforce assessment tools for entire hospital systems, AI-powered training platforms, and even exploring parallel healthcare delivery models.
This approach reflects the new reality of company building in the AI era. Traditional defensibility through technology moats has eroded because development costs are plummeting. Instead, companies must build multiple interconnected value streams around their core competency.
The numbers support this thesis. TERN’s 80-person team generates more revenue per employee than most traditional recruitment firms with thousands of workers. The company is growing 40% month-over-month while maintaining the operational efficiency that only AI-native architecture enables.
The Next Life-Changing Decision
Looking ahead, Nigam sees massive opportunities in other life-changing decision categories. Each represents a potential multi-billion dollar market where supply constraints, trust deficits, and complex processes create opportunities for technology-driven intermediaries.
The global healthcare workforce crisis provides immediate validation. With aging populations across developed nations and growing healthcare demands in emerging markets, the need for efficient, ethical talent mobility has never been greater.
For entrepreneurs, Nigam’s journey offers a blueprint: identify moments when consumers make their biggest commitments, understand the supply-side constraints, and build AI-native solutions that can operate at government scale. The companies that master this formula won’t just build businesses - they’ll build the infrastructure for entire industries.
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