Kashif Aftab

Founder & CEO SkillGigs, Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Kashif Aftab is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SkillGigs, a Houston-based talent marketplace for healthcare and IT professionals that he launched in 2017. The platform’s premise is disintermediation: rather than routing candidates through recruiters who control information on both sides, SkillGigs lets professionals present themselves directly to employers and receive bids for their work. Aftab came to it after two decades inside traditional staffing, having founded and exited four prior ventures spanning IT integration, travel nurse staffing, and a holding company he took public in the United Kingdom.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of SkillGigs since 2017, leading product design, engineering, and business growth for its AI-powered talent marketplace.
• Serial entrepreneur across four ventures that reached exits, with more than $200 million in staffing services sold and managed.
• Founder of IQ Tech Pros, an IT integration network he describes as having grown past 30,000 members.
• Founder of NursesPro, a travel nurse staffing company serving major US hospital systems.
• Founder of TAMH, a holding and investment company taken public in the United Kingdom.
• Member of the Forbes Technology Council.

Professional Journey

By his own account, Aftab’s interest in business began at ten years old on visits to his father’s manufacturing facility, and his interest in software began a year later when he wrote his first code. He founded his first company, an IT consulting firm, at twenty-five, and bootstrapped it to profitability within its first year — a pattern of self-funded operation that recurs through his later ventures.

After exiting that business he founded three more. IQ Tech Pros was built as a full-service IT integration network, growing to a membership he places above 30,000. NursesPro moved him into healthcare staffing, placing travel nurses with large US hospital systems, and gave him direct exposure to the two-sided market dynamics that would later shape SkillGigs. TAMH, a holding and investment company, was taken public in the United Kingdom. Across these businesses he has sold and managed more than $200 million in staffing services and accumulated over twenty years in IT and healthcare placement.

That experience also supplied the grievance behind SkillGigs. Traditional staffing works as a brokered market in which the agency holds the information: candidates rarely know what a role pays or who else is being considered, employers rarely see the full candidate pool, and the intermediary captures margin for managing that asymmetry. Aftab founded SkillGigs in 2017 on the view that both sides would prefer to transact directly, building a marketplace where professionals publish their skills and availability and receive bids from employers, with AI used to match candidates to roles and to surface pay transparency that the agency model tends to suppress. The company focuses on healthcare and IT, the two verticals where contract and travel work are most established and where his own operating history lay.

He continues to lead SkillGigs from Houston, with direct involvement in product and engineering rather than a purely executive remit, and participates in the Forbes Technology Council.

Education

Education details for this profile could not be established from publicly available sources.