UK healthcare startup Lifted raises £1.6 million for tech-enabled home care that pays a living wage

Lifted, a London-based home healthcare startup, has raised £1.6 million in a seed round led by Fuel Ventures. Vitry Enfants and Marc Cohen of 1818 Venture Capital also participated. This investment brings the total raised to £3.1 million, since Lifted was first incubated by corporate venture builder Zero 1 back in 2018.

Co-founder Rachael Crook was 24 when her mother was diagnosed with dementia at 56, and she found navigating home care so “stressful and isolating” that she set out to create a better solution, with fellow co-founder Sam Cohen.

The startup provides a combination of personalised and in-person care, which ranges from medical to social support, as well as an app where family members can manage everything related. Users can review and select a carer, book visits and outline tasks to be completed, read carer notes about the visit, and pay for the service — which has hourly, overnight, and live-in rates.

A particular point of pride for Lifted is that it recruits, trains and employs all of its carers, all while paying them 20 percent above the market average. In a press release, the UK startup says less than two percent of 10,000 home care companies pay the ‘London Living Wage’, and it is one of those few.

“Lifted’s approach of employing carers, paying a living wage and empowering them to do their work through software is why they will continue to grow quickly,” says Mark Pearson, founder of Fuel Ventures. Since launch in March 2019, the business has grown revenues at an average of 20 percent month over month, according to a press release.

“We are proud of the success we have seen in just over a year. We have excellent customer reviews, provide award winning care, a fast-growing business, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits everyone,” says Cook, who is also the startup’s CEO. “Now the aim is to develop our platform to bring more joy to families, quickly scale the business and build on the data-driven capabilities of our platform, which this funding will enable us to do.”