Startup is turning live-in care into a gig-economy platform –
Summary
I recently covered how Cera in the U.K. just raised $320 million to shift monitoring of patients into the home rather than over-flowing hospitals.Now another startup aims to create an almost gig-economy style platform for people providing live-in care to the elderly, this time in Europe.Marta, the European digital platform for live-in care, says when people try to arrange this kind of care for their elderly relatives, there are up to six intermediaries involved, and four out of five placements fail. I guess you might call it UpWork for live-in care?Its now raised a 6.6 million seed round led by Capnamic, alongside co-lead Almaz Capital. Existing investors such as Christian Vollmann, Johannes Schaback, Laura Esnola, Dr. Steffen Zoller and Julian Stiefel also participated.The startup plans to now scale up in its European markets of Germany, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.The market its addressing is an 18 billion market in the DACH region alone.Given that Germany alone has more than 4 million people seeking at-home care and there are only 280,000 caregivers able to do this, the market is sizable.Martas says its algorithm-based marketplace enables matchmaking between care seekers and caregivers, increasing transparency and a person-to-person experience.There are hundreds of examples of how elderly care can go wrong and its almost impossible for humans to accurately predict placement success because its just so many data points. We believe that we can leverage technology significantly to help elderly people and their families as well as the caregivers, said Jan Hoffmann, co-founder of marta in a statement.Martas founders, Philipp Buhr and Hoffmann started marta in 2020 after having problems finding carers for relatives.Marta has created a transparent marketplace where it connects caregivers directly with families seeking care. Most importantly, we are excited about the teams enthusiasm for solving a paramount societal problem, J\xf6rg Binnenbr\xfccker, founding partner at Capnamic, said in a statement.