UK in-home healthcare provider Cera raises $150M to scale its AI platform
Summary
Around the world, public healthcare systems have struggled to reset post-pandemic, and in particular, the increasingly aged populations in Western countries are putting pressure on services, not least in the U.K. where NHS in crisis is a regular headline in the media. Its with this background that Cera, a proprietary software platform and in-home healthcare provider in the U.K., has raised a $150 million in a mixture of debt and equity. The company said the majority of this is debt, but declined to give a split and also demurred on its valuation.The round was led by funds affiliated with BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capital in order to scale Ceras platform. Recognizable equity investors to date include Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth.London, and long-time U.K. investor Robin Klein.A spokesperson for Cera added that although this has yet to be reflected in publicly filed accounts, the company was EBITA-positive in 2023 and became free-cashflow positive in 2024, and is increasingly a self-sustaining business, hence why it could raise this debt round.In an interview with TechCrunch, Dr. Ben Maruthappu MBE, founder & CEO of Cera, said: We are getting to profitability, plus we have very significantly scaled how were using our technology and AI, and weve expanded into more services in the home.Cera caregivers use its app to plan their work and log patient symptoms. So were a much more comprehensive health care at home provider.He also said the AI-driven aspect of the business was based on the data it collects: The other key advantage is what were doing with technology, more specifically AI Were logging information about patients from those visits on our app thats given us now one of the largest home healthcare datasets in the world, definitely the largest in Europe, and weve been able to analyze that dataset in lots of different ways to build algorithms, algorithms that relate if someones going to have a fall before they do.We can predict over 80% of falls a week before they happen.