Elderly home care is a highly personal form of care provision, and its an area that has been in need of a facelift. Empowered by tech, Helppy has developed a platform that will revolutionise the sector and is based around a neighbourhood care model. The concept allows for more personal care, full transparency and higher productivity than the traditional route-based shift worker model.
As proof of its concept, the previously bootstrapped company has just picked up €3 million in a round led by Alliance Venture. Pre-seed investors Icebreaker.vc, Johannes Schildt, the Co-Founder and CEO of Kry/Livi and Elias Aalto, the Co-Founder of Wolt, also participated in the round and continued to back Helppy.
Anders Hallin, Partner of Alliance VC said: “Helppy has completely redesigned the home care model, allowing them to provide better care and better experience for all parties involved. Their model is unique and can solve many of the problems the ageing population in Europe faces from nurse shortage to the rising demand for care services.”
Founded in Helsinki in 2018, Helppy was developed when founder Richard Nordström needed care for his own mother. When his mother sadly fell ill, Richard found that the existing care provisions were too hard to organise and the service too impersonal. Helppy was developed as a tech-empowered neighbourhood model, which allows the senior to be visited by familiar ‘helppers’. From Helppy, the family member gets personal, trustworthy and affordable help for the ageing parent, hassle-free.
Richard Nordström, Founder & CEO of Helppy, explained: “We’re building the next-generation model of home care. With our model, you will get named ‘helppers’ or nurses, know who visits, know their backgrounds, get visit notes and be able to communicate with them. Using tech to make it personal and trustworthy – at the same price or lower than home care in general.”
The Finnish startup has now helped nearly a thousand families in Finland and attracted over 5000 nurses and personal assistants to sign up on the platform and offer their help to seniors in need.
Richard Nordström, added: “We believe that our type of model will be adopted by a significant part of the home care market in the next few years, and help solve the ongoing nurse shortage. We’re seeing this happening already in the US, but now also emerging in Europe. The home care market only in Europe is worth over €100 billion and growing 8% annually. With the new funding we’re launching operations now in several markets in Central Europe. ”
With the fresh funding, Helppy will now expand beyond Finland, taking its personalised care offering to families in need across the continent. In addition, the startup will welcome former Swappie Head of DACH region Lauri Tevilin to the team to head growth plans.
Riku Seppälä, a Founding Partner of Icebreaker.vc, added: “Helppy’s team has succeeded in developing technology that revolutionizes the quality of the care for the customer. Coming from Finland and having proven their concept in the world’s most developed care market, we see that Helppy can make a real impact on the elderly care system in Europe”.
Johannes Schildt, the Co-Founder of Kry, said: “Helppy innovates elderly care by using technology to make it more continuous, personal and tailored to each individual’s needs. We need great teams who develop our welfare services and Helppy injects innovation into this much-needed part of healthcare, elderly care”.
