Social care startup Lifted raises £1.5M for end-to-end elderly care platform

The number of elderly adults requiring home care is set to grow at an alarming rate in most western countries as people live progressively longer. But underinvestment in technology and healthcare means society is at risk of vastly under-delivering. It’s very hard to scale these services and subsequently, no company has more than a low percentage market share. Few home care brands have much trust. In the U.K., 38% of people caring for a loved one (81% of whom are women) drop out of the workforce to have to deal with elderly relatives.

In the U.K., a few companies are trying to address this issue: Traditional incumbents like Bluebird Care and Home Instead, which are traditional home care agencies, which don’t scale; “Introductory agencies” like Supercarers and Elder, which do not train their carers directly with the associated problems; and so-called tech-enabled new players like Cera, which have limits to tech deployment as it is.

London-based Lifted plans to address some of these shortcomings with a full-blown end-to-end “Apple-like” solution.

It has now raised £1.5 million in seed funding after being founded by Rachael Crook and Sam Cohen. Crook is a former Cabinet Office and McKinsey Consultant, who started Lifted after a frustrating experience trying to arrange care for her mother after she was diagnosed with dementia at age 56.

The startup was incubated inside Zero 1, a new corporate venture builder.

The company is a CQC-regulated care provider, which gives families real-time updates on care and a set of wellness data about their loved one. The Care Management Platform is a way to schedule visits, keep a check on tasks that have been completed and receive notifications when care begins and ends.

The default rate is £19 an hour for hourly care and £950 a week for live-in care. Clients can choose to purchase this as an additional service for which they will charge a subscription fee.

Crook says: “There are few more important decisions than who to trust to look after your loved ones. Yet the current market is broken with a lack of transparency, poor quality care and poor working conditions for carers. Precious data languishes in paper files. Lifted is on a mission to change this by harnessing the power of technology and data to transform the quality of care and improve the lives of carers and families.”

Lifted’s future plans include broadening their service offering by combining professional care and in-home technology. This will bring together health alerts, in-home sensors and professional carers to transform what it means to care.

Lifted will develop AI-based analytics to predict and prevent health deterioration.

Unlike other startup care providers, Lifted directly employs its carers and pays the London Living Wage, which is 20% above the market average for hourly care and is enabled by operational savings achieved by using a technology platform.

Founded in 2018 by Finn MacCabe, Damian Cristian and Guy Conway, Zero 1 has built three new companies in insurance, cloud compute and healthcare, in partnership with FTSE 100 companies.