Berlin-based marta, a startup that provides software for the live-in care market, announced on Thursday that it has raised €6.6M in a Seed round of funding led by Capnamic and co-lead Almaz Capital.
Jörg Binnenbrücker, Founding Partner at Capnamic, says, “marta has created a transparent marketplace that connects caregivers directly with families seeking care. We have been following marta for the past months and are excited about the teams’ enthusiasm for solving a paramount societal problem.”
The round also saw participation from GMPVC, Ithaca, SumUp Impact Fund, Verve Ventures, and renowned business angels. Existing investors, including prominent German entrepreneurs and business angels Christian Vollmann, Johannes Schaback, Laura Esnola, Dr Steffen Zoller, and Julian Stiefel, also participated.
Making 24 hours care affordable and accessible to all
Globally, families with relatives in need of care, including the caregivers themselves, face hardships in organising care. It is time-consuming, the market is disjointed, and it lacks transparency, legal security, and professional supervision. However, as the population ages, elderly care is becoming increasingly important.
The information necessary to link carers with careseekers is usually ignored or lost since current solutions for senior care can include up to 6 middlemen intermediaries. As a result, four out of every five placements fail, an unacceptably high breakdown rate that causes anxiety, misunderstanding, and anger among all parties.
This is where the marta platform steps in. The platform uses data and a matching algorithm to provide a self-service platform that completely avoids such avoidable failures entirely.
With its data-driven methodology, marta assures effective matches, reduces costs and complexity for families looking to care for ageing relatives, and gives caregivers power to negotiate the terms of their contract and their earnings.
Jan Hoffmann, co-founder of marta, says, “There are hundreds of examples of how elderly care can go wrong and it’s almost impossible for humans to accurately predict placement success. There are simply too many requirements, skills and preferences on both sides to consider. We have seen how difficult it was to organise care with our grandparents. Ageing is a natural process and we must have the tools and skills to manage it appropriately. We believe that we can leverage technology to help elderly people and their families as well as the caregivers.”
How was marta born?
Founders Philipp Buhr and Jan Hoffmann discovered the care industry in a similar way most people do: their grandparents needed care and they were in charge of finding a live-in caregiver.
In a complicated, overpriced market, both individuals looked for five years to find a decent agency to work with before their frustration led them to launch marta in 2020 and build what they were looking for themselves.
Customers of marta are given the option to choose their own live-in caregivers. Seniors have the choice of who they wish to live with. Families may rest easy knowing that every contractor who enters their house has been vetted and reviewed by the staff and other families in the past.
Caregivers can select a home based on thorough and accurate case data, which includes images of the living situation. marta has created a number of tools to automate the carers’ backoffice in addition to the matching feature, allowing them to handle their registration, insurances, bills, and taxes through the platform. As a result, caregivers are free to concentrate on what they do best: deliver high-quality care.
After 18 months of operation, marta is now active in four nations with 40 team members, and has helped over a thousand clients and carers with at-home care.
Capital utilisation
According to a statement by marta, more than 4 million older people in Germany alone need at-home care, yet there are only 280,000 caregivers employed in the ambulant care business. Over 600,000 live-in caretakers from CEE countries have the possibility to move to Germany to fill the gap caused by this enormous imbalance.
Therefore, marta says it will use the proceeds to expand its core team in Germany, Poland, Romania and Lithuania as well as scale up business processes – driven by the aim to set new standards for affordable, transparent, and reliable live-in care.
01
Upstream Festival is back for its sixth edition! 4 solid reasons to mark your calendar