UK home care provider Lifted has recently announced a £1.5 million (€1.7 million) seed investment from venture building studio Zero-1.
The London-based startup has raised seed funding to transform the home care sector. It has been founded former management consultant Rachael Crook and Zero 1, a new corporate venture builder which is working with FTSE 100 corporate partners, to build companies that can tackle the world’s biggest challenges.
Lifted was founded as a solution to the growing need for affordable home care for an ageing population. Today one in 150 adults use home care services in the UK, and this figure is set to increase by an estimated 80 per cent in the next 20 years.
The company is a CQC-regulated care provider that delivers exceptional care for loved ones and peace of mind for families. Using Lifted’s proprietary Care Management Platform, families get real time updates on care, leave instant reviews, and see 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.
Lifted’s CEO has first hand experience of struggling to find appropriate care for a loved one at home. Rachael Crook, former Cabinet Office and McKinsey Consultant, co-founded Lifted with Zero 1 after a frustrating experience trying to arrange care for her mother after she was diagnosed with dementia aged 56.
Rachael said: “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’s platform harnesses thousands of data points and Lifted will develop AI-based analytics to predict and prevent health deterioration, so that older adults can live longer at home.
The home care services market in the UK has 10,000 providers, none of whom have more than a 2 per cent market share, and the monthly cost of home care is 1.5 times that of the average mortgage. Lifted is transforming elderly home care by embedding technology in every aspect of the business, and working to improve the lives of carers.
Unlike other startup care providers, Lifted directly employs its carers and pays the London Living Wage, which is 20 per cent above the market average for hourly care and enabled by operational savings achieved by using a technology platform.
Seed funding will be used to support Lifted’s R&D, which is aimed at creating services that increase the quality of patient care, by using behavioural change models to increase the quality of care.
Gustava xx, whose mother Diana is looked after by a Lifted carer, said: “I knew straight away that Lifted was different: from the first phone conversation to everyday care, their service has been based on empathy, respect and most of all it’s tailored to fit our mother and her personality. The app makes life easier for all. This is definitely the future of caring.”
Creating and building innovative new companies
Lifted is one of the first companies founded by Zero 1, a new venture builder that builds and scales mission-led businesses in partnership with large corporations.
Zero 1 brings together its resources, infrastructure, network, and experience to help corporations co-create startups taking them through conception, launch and scaling to maturity. It enables FTSE 100 companies to tackle disruptive threats to their core business head on by building new adjacent ventures at unrivaled speed and costs.
As part of Zero 1’s new approach to corporate venture it also seeks to create and found businesses that have a social and ethical mission at their core – in the case of Lifted, that is innovating care of the elderly.
Founded in 2018 by Finn MacCabe, Damian Cristian and Guy Conway, Zero 1 has already built three new companies in Insurance, Cloud Compute and Health Care, in partnership with FTSE 100 companies.
“The requirement for corporations to challenge their core business model has never been greater. In 1952 the average lifespan of a S&P 500 business was 75 years, now it’s likely to survive just 15 years. We offer what we call venture building as a service which allows large organisations to enter new markets, unlock huge opportunities, and make better use of the trillion pounds of capital locked up on corporate balance sheets. Lifted is a great example of that,” said MacCabe.
Another business that Zero 1 has developed in partnership with a leading energy provider, is Heata, which will distribute cloud computing power to homes – leading to lower internet and heating costs for homeowners, and more affordable greener costs for business with cloud requirements.
— Press release
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