Scale is excited to announce our investment in Inspiren’s $100M Series B!
By 2030, 1 in 5 Americans will be aged 65 or older, and without technology senior living communities won’t be able to safely keep up with demand. Inspiren is creating a safer future for older adults by helping senior living communities deliver safer, higher quality care through unifying resident safety, care planning, staffing, and emergency response into a single, AI-powered platform.
Today, senior living care teams are flying blind on critical details of patient care and rely on inaccurate care plans, midnight rounding, and some of the worst software you’ve ever seen to deliver care to incredibly vulnerable patient populations. Inspiren replaces guesswork with data by combining hardware and software to give care teams a real-time view of resident behavior they can use for both tactical care delivery and long-term planning. The end result? Safe residents, happy staff members, and financially prosperous senior living communities.
Inspiren is a case study in category creation and how impeccable execution can shift industry sentiment in a matter of months. We were first introduced to the business last fall and were immediately impressed with Alex and the value Inspiren was delivering to its early adopters. However, industry sentiment at large was mixed. Theoretical ROI was easy to grok, but operators burned by past generations of technology over-promising and under-delivering had concerns about product quality and resident privacy. Fast forward eight months and industry sentiment had totally flipped: Inspiren is the obviously better way to run a senior living community.
So what changed and convinced operators that Inspiren should be the new standard of care? At the core of Inspiren’s success is privacy-first design driven by tight coupling between hardware and software. When a community adopts Inspiren, sensors are installed in resident’s rooms that monitor activity and alert nurses when residents might be in trouble. To be clear, these aren’t security cameras: they’re beautiful, unobtrusive devices that leverage audio, visual, and radar inputs to create a privacy-preserving digital twin of every resident. Care teams get exactly the right amount of information to help residents when they need it and residents don’t feel like they’re living under a surveillance state.
Informed care teams are effective care teams and Inspiren’s data helps create safer communities. This is particularly important when resident needs change rapidly. When residents join a community, there’s an initial medical evaluation that determines a care plan based on their needs. However, resident health can change meaningfully in a matter of weeks. In the current state, care teams will recognize that and start ad-hoc delivering more care, but without a formal re-evaluation the care plan won’t be rigorous, and the community won’t be compensated for the increased care levels. Inspiren changes that. Data from Inspiren’s sensors is fed back into their software platform and will proactively flag residents who might need increased care. Inspiren’s clinical team reviews that data with communities and together they make sure that all residents are getting the care they need with financial arrangements that make sense for the community. The results are stunning: Inspiren customers are seeing 80%+ reductions in bedroom-related falls with an injury.
Inspiren is the latest of many bundled sensors and software deals in our portfolio and joins the likes of Motive, Locus Robotics, Spot AI, VergeSense, and others injecting intelligence into real-world operations. A hard-earned learning of ours is that it’s incredibly difficult to build a sensor + software platform that delivers hard ROI to customers at a price point that makes the unit economics work for the business. Alex, Michael, and the rest of the Inspiren team have done exactly that and are helping some of the largest senior living communities better serve thousands of residents and their families. We’re honored to be a part of their mission.
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“Returning to Emerald feels both natural and energizing,” said Cédric Mutz. “The firm is at an exciting inflection point, with new funds, new mandates, and a growing international footprint. I look forward to helping our portfolio companies scale their impact while delivering strong performance for our investors.”