Family.cards, a Brandenburg-based start-up that specialises in the development of simple digital accessibility solutions for seniors, has today announced a €1.2M seed funding round. The round was led by Brandenburg Kapital and OHA Osnabruck Healthcare 7 Ventures. Existing investors, Antler and Birdhouse, also provided funding.
Family.cards is empowering elderly people to access digital services. Research shows that as many as 69 million seniors in Europe are not able to use touch screens because of cognitive, physical, or psychological decline. This prevents them from completing basic tasks, such as booking medical appointments, communicating with their families or watching video content.
Family.cards has developed a revolutionary system that offers seniors access to a variety of digital services via their television. The simple card system, which is connected to the TV via a card reader, enables intuitive functions such as video calls, sharing photos and videos, playing music and audio books, accessing age-appropriate sports exercises and much more.
The funding will be used to further develop the technology, add third party apps on the family.cards card-store and grow the team and expand into new markets across Europe.
"We are very pleased with the trust and support of our new and existing investors," said Teo Ortega, co-founder and CEO of Family.cards. "This financing enables us to further develop our innovative platform and accelerate the market launch in order to offer even more seniors the opportunity to easily participate in the digital world."
Katja Kühnel, Senior Investment Manager at Brandenburg Kapital, commented, “The use of digital solutions by older adults is a prerequisite for demographic change to succeed. However, existing offers are often not appropriately designed for this target group. Family.cards has set out to address this neglected, major need in the market.”
OHA General Manager Jan-Felix Simon, comments: “We accompanied the family.cards team in our Healthcare Accelerator and were immediately impressed by the team and their product. The decision to invest was therefore easy for us”
Family.cards was founded in 2022 when the co-founders, Teo Ortega and Simon Hafner, met during the Antler residency in Berlin. Teo Ortega is a serial entrepreneur who has held a number of senior roles as product lead at companies such as Citibox, koko and TheMotion. Simon Hafner has a technology and engineering background, and he spent a number of years working at Zalando as a software engineer.
"The demand for uncomplicated digital solutions for seniors is enormous, and our pre-orders and pilot projects so far clearly show that Family.cards fills a large gap in the market," adds Teo Ortega CEO and co-founder. "With the support of our investors, we are ready to offer our platform nationwide and enable seniors to participate in a new way of accessing digital content."
Alan Poensgen, Partner at Antler, comments, “As the most active investor in Europe, we recognise founding teams with serious potential. This is an outstanding founding team which combines a seasoned entrepreneur who has built complex hardware before, together with a technical founder who has worked on some of the hardest technical challenges for one of Europe's top technology organisations. It is very exciting to work with them as they realise their shared ambition to build technology that has a positive impact on society and improves the lives of older people.”
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