After establishing itself in the United Kingdom in 2016 and expanding into Australia in 2024, Messly, a marketplace connecting physicians seeking opportunities with locum tenens staffing agencies, is preparing to enter the United States.
Ahead of the launch, co-founder Christopher Kurwie spoke with Locumpedia about the company’s origins, the philosophy behind its platform, and why he believes the time is right to bring it to the US.
A Physician’s Frustration Sparks a Business Idea
Messly was founded by Dr. Abrar Gundroo (top), a physician who trained at Cambridge University and began his career in the National Health Service (NHS), and Kurwie, his longtime friend. The idea traces back to Gundroo’s early years working as a resident, when he believed he lacked visibility into the range of work available to him.
“He felt like there were great opportunities out there that he’d never heard of,” Kurwie said, adding that Gundroo also saw hospitals that were short staffed with no effective way to reach physicians who might want the work. “There just wasn’t a good connection between those two sides, the clinicians and the organizations trying to reach them.”
Gundroo and Kurwie spent several years testing different approaches before settling on the model that became Messly.
Today, the company describes itself as a marketplace connecting physicians seeking locum tenens assignments with staffing companies, a structure Kurwie compares to other two-sided marketplaces, such as Airbnb, that is central to its model. Messly isn’t a staffing firm itself and has no direct relationships with hospitals in the UK, Australia, or the US.
“We’re very much a service provider,” Kurwie said. “Our company is designed to support staffing firms, not compete with them.”
“We’re very much a service provider. Our company is designed to support staffing firms, not compete with them.”
Quality Over Quantity
Kurwie described Messly’s core differentiation from job boards as a focus on candidate quality rather than volume.
“We’re not going to give staffing companies 10,000 candidates,” he said. “Rather than leaving them to sort through thousands of names, we do that work ourselves first.”
Instead, physicians go through what Kurwie called an extensive onboarding process before appearing on the platform. Messly verifies each one’s NPI, performs an FSMB check, reviews the exclusions list, and runs a malpractice check. Those who pass then build a detailed, anonymized profile covering their state registrations, availability, preferred schedules, travel preferences, and pay expectations.
Locum tenens staffing agencies can set alerts by specialty and state and will be notified when a matching physician joins the platform. They can review a profile and send what Messly calls a pitch, an introductory message describing themselves and anonymized assignments, before a direct conversation is facilitated.
“We’d rather do the work ourselves in the background, screening, filtering, and speaking with physicians before showing you 100 candidates you’re going to want to meet,” Kurwie said.
Providers using the platform can also see reviews written by others about specific recruiters and locum tenens staffing companies before deciding whether to engage.
Messly enforces a code of conduct on both sides of its platform. Kurwie said the company has removed both staffing firms and physicians who were not honest about information shared on Messly.
A Risk-free Approach
The platform’s payment structure is built around the same premise. Agencies do not make a payment until a physician has started an assignment and begun billing the client, meaning Messly’s clients incur no upfront cost and pay nothing if a placement is never made.
Kurwie explained, “This puts us into the shoes of our customers. We don’t get paid unless they do, and so we only have a viable business if we can help them generate significant numbers of new placements.”
“This puts us into the shoes of our customers. We don’t get paid unless they do, and so we only have a viable business if we can help them generate significant numbers of new placements.”
A Deliberate Path to the US Market
Less than a decade later, Messly expanded from the UK to Australia, a move Kurwie said confirmed that the problems the company set out to solve were not unique to the UK healthcare system. That experience helped shape the decision to enter the US next, given the size of the market.
The company has spent close to a year preparing for the launch rather than assuming its UK and Australian approach would translate directly.
“We’re building everything from scratch, reconsidering everything in terms of the product features, customer support, and marketing strategy,” Kurwie said.
A Changing Workforce, and What Comes Next
Kurwie said physician career patterns have shifted across generations, with more doctors, particularly younger ones, taking career breaks around residency or fellowship to pursue locum tenens work or healthcare-adjacent roles outside of clinical practice. It’s a pattern he said was far less common a decade or two ago.
He expects that trend to continue over the next five years, pushing hospitals toward a staffing mix that includes more temporary clinicians alongside permanent ones, even as the healthcare industry continues to adjust to workforce effects that trace back to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Asked what he most wants staffing companies to understand about Messly, Kurwie pointed to how the platform differs from traditional job boards through the quality of its candidates and the support his company provides around each match.
“That’s really what the next few months are about,” Kurwie said, “starting to build that reputation and trust as a service provider that’s going to look after their best interests.”
As Messly moves closer to its US debut, Kurwie believes fostering trust from the very beginning remains central to the company’s approach.
“We’ve used Messly for six years now. They have helped us grow our revenue by putting us in front of doctors we would never have reached. It’s easy and simple to use, the doctors are always high-quality, and my team love it.”
