“I came through Boston with the intent of either working with or starting my own startup,” says CareAcademy Co-Founder, President, and CEO Helen Adeosun.
Prior to joining the Boston tech scene, Adeosun had a varied career in several fields, including education, policy, and home care. She also holds a Master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. As is the case with anyone working in a particular field long enough, Adeosun began noticing problems within the home care space. For one, she saw a problem in the way home caregivers were being trained.
“The whole training experience is trial-by-fire,” she said. “A lot of home care agencies will hire caregivers without the proper training, or they may not learn about the repercussions.”
Like many first-time entrepreneurs looking to solve a problem, Adeosun started to do some research about the industry she was looking to disrupt. She found that, while there was an abundance of home care agencies, training is only a small, “niche,” portion of the market.
The home care market is a rapidly growing industry, increasing nearly 15% YOY as baby boomers become older.
“There is a demographic out there that wants to have care from home,” Adeosun said. “Having the proper training on hand is key.”
Adeosun partnered up with Dr. Madhuri Reddy, who also noticed the same issues within home care, to find a company that would create a training platform for home caregivers. Reddy became CareAcademy's Chief Medical Officer.
The company was founded with the intent of providing would-be caregivers the chance to receive a step-by-step process through digital video content.
“We are here to uplift caregivers and give them the training they need,” said Adeosun. “Both Madhuri and I have education experience, so we know how to engage caregivers with training.”
CareAcademy provides home care agencies, and caregivers going through independent training, video-based curriculum. The videos, which are produced and filmed in Boston, are scenario-driven and provide insight for any particular situation a home caregiver might find themselves in. The founder's experience in education, home care, and healthcare has given them an "edge," so to speak, in giving users the content they need.
The company has designed an easy-to-navigate dashboard where users can select a video without having to go through pages of content. The platform is available for both computers and smartphones.
“We interviewed agencies and observed them. We wanted to know what the ideal experience in managing training for caregivers is,” said CareAcademy CTO Yvan Castilloux. “We have obtained strong traction with customers with a design-first mentality in order to keep it simple. Our strong team optimized for the right amount of front-end work vs. back-end automation in order to realize the ideal experience.”
Castilloux, who joined the company earlier this year, has extensive experience working as a CTO and helped round out the development team at CareAcademy.
Currently, the company utilizes a B2B model and has provided curriculum to 40 smaller-scale homecare agencies across the country, one of them is Carelinx which holds 25,000 home caregivers across the country. In addition to those numbers, the company has also reached 15,000 caregivers.
“We are a growing company, and I think we are a great compliment to what Boston does,” she said.
CareAcademy left the Techstars Boston program earlier this year, and they stood out from other companies in the program.
“We were the only one that was home care-related,” Adeosun said. “One of the reasons why we chose Techstars was because of the environment they provide startups. There are very few places that are both hubs of capital and health care. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in Boston.”
Earlier this year, the company raised $1.7 million in funding. Anyone with an aging parent will see the benefit of a company like CareAcademy. Combined with their experience teaching students, as well as their knowledge of the homecare field, Reddy and Adeosun are making sure that the next generation of home caregivers have the training they need.
Colin Barry is a contributor to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash.