CareAcademy

Founder: Helen Adeosun
Founding: 2016
Mission: To accelerate the world’s transition to a caregiver-centric healthcare system by elevating caregivers and enabling excellent health outcomes
Employees: 75 & 22% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $33M Raised
Investors: Goldman Sachs Asset Management, MassMutual through the MM Catalyst Fund, Impact America Fund, Rethink Education, Unseen Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, LLC
Key Customers: Comfort Keepers, The Key, Always Best Care, Home Helpers, Griswold Home Care
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation: Undisclosed – Raised $20M Series B in Q2 ‘22
^ There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

CareAcademy is “training & up-skilling software for caregivers”. Founded by Helen Adeosun in 2016, Helen moved to Boston from Georgia to attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education. There, she took a class called Development Ventures as part of a cross-registration between MIT & Harvard graduate students. The focus of the class was to come up with businesses which had social impact. Helen proposed a concept for upskilling care workers that was well received and, just a year later, her entrepreneurial journey began. Two years later, she was focused on the business full time.

Helen had previous experience as a home care worker, her mom was a nurse, and she had aunts & uncles who worked in direct care at some point in their careers too. She wanted to help create better career pathways for people in her community that aspired to transition from working in childcare to becoming a registered nurse, for example. Online training could help facilitate higher income earning opportunities to a segment of our population already working their tails off. The initial model was catered to caregivers working in childcare because there’s a lot of demand for those specializations. And that sound you hear is all parents aggressively nodding in unison. 

Now that explains a lot of the Founding vision and some important ways of helping our fellow American care workers make their way up in the world. Which is great! But there was a bigger opportunity out there. There is a more urgent need to train caregivers of older adults in home care, home health, and assisted living facilities. Here are a couple mind blowing statistics to better understand the rapidly changing country we live in: 

• Today there are approximately 54M Americans older than 65. By 2040, that number could grow to 80M. (Urban.org)
• According to the Stanford Center on Longevity as many as 50% of today’s American 5 year olds can expect to live to the age of 100

We’re living longer. Women are living longer than men too. Sorry guys. The infrastructure to support that type of growth is sorely lacking. There are a few things we need to do. We can build a lot more facilities, which we’ll certainly be doing. Or we could use software to empower a growing workforce focused on the how of providing care to some of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. That’s CareAcademy!

The CareAcademy team has optimized their whole software experience to be mobile first and “bite sized” for a workforce that is extremely busy and always on the go. An essential theme that CareAcademy bases their whole delivery model around is that healthcare is a “people first” business. With the institutional costs of elder care as high as they are today, home care solutions are on the rise. The pandemic supercharged the need for a more highly trained workforce servicing our aging populations’ needs. This direct care workforce is largely women and people of color, a win for our overall health care system and a bridge to better professional opportunities.

Some projections say we’ll need more than 7.4M new direct care workers by 2029 to meet the home & facility care industry’s rapidly growing needs (PHI). Holy moly, right? CareAcademy is propelling the industry forward by helping caregivers gain the necessary skills, education, and training to deliver better care and succeed in their careers. They’re focused on new avenues to attract entrants to the caregiving profession too. 

CareAcademy’s go to market motion is B2B, working directly with employees through employers like home care and home health agencies on programs such as Specialized Certifications, Nurse Education, and Administrator Training. Interestingly, childcare is becoming an increasingly attractive vertical to re-enter with the rise of flexible workplace policies. Life always comes full circle!

Today, CareAcademy serves over 2,000 customers and has trained nearly half a million caregivers who have completed over 2 million classes. These impact numbers have doubled over the past year too! CareAcademy has been named one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. as a member of the Inc 5000 in 2021 & 2022, Best in Business in 2022 and Inc Northeast Regionals in 2023. Their revenue grew by 349% between 2019 and 2021 (as reported by Inc.).

Helen & team are focused on scaling efficiently and fine tuning their processes in this tighter macro environment so they can get smarter as an organization. During all hands meetings they often have a team member read the company’s mission & values aloud to ensure they stay front and center. They’re laser focused on serving their customers and helping their employees reach their full potential. There are team members at CareAcademy that have been with the company since they were interns, some for more than half a decade. Their front line management team, called the MTeam, reports to their COO Robyn Lunsford. As Becki, one of their Senior Marketing team members told me “your best customers are the ones you already have and your best employees are the ones you already have too”. That should be on a postcard, shouldn’t it??

Operators to Know (Locally):

• Ashwin Choithramani, Senior Demand Generation Manager
• Becki Harrington-Davis, Senior Content Marketing Manager
• Lillian Roche, Director of Customer Success
• Alex Sawyers, Director of People Ops
• Michelle Hochberg, Senior Product Manager
• Franklin Ervin, Director of Operations
• Perry Rahman-Porras, Director of Partnerships & Business Development

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the CareAcademy team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• Senior Software Engineer

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the key initiatives for 2023?
• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most help?
• Could you share some details about the employee onboarding process & training? 
• What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? 

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about CareAcademy you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more home care providers into the digital age. All of our elders applaud your efforts. See you around town!