For years, ambitious startup founders have tried to tackle some of the most important problems in the U.S.—like the caregiving crisis. Often, it’s been proven that some problems (like access to child care) just require public-sector action for a true solution.
But one startup recently caught my eye for finding a corner of the caregiving crisis to fix—one in which it seems as if tech can actually be an answer. Jenny Lee is the cofounder of Hera, which is taking advantage of 2024 reforms to Medicare permitting the reimbursement of care coordination services. Now nine months in, Hera is offering virtual care coordination for families of older adults—not physical caregiving itself, but assistance with the hours spent arranging medications and fighting on the phone with insurance companies. The company just raised a $27 million Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures, I can exclusively report.
It’s a tech-driven solution to the demands of the sandwich generation that nearly always fall on women. “It’s just always fallen on the shoulders of family,” Lee says, explaining why this problem hasn’t been tackled already. “It’s often the adult daughter that ends up shouldering this.”
Lee was an early employee at Headway, where she observed the impact of insurance changes to mental health coverage (and the growth of startups like Alma as a result). Bain Capital Ventures’ Alysaa Co, who led this investment, compares the two categories too.
Lee had the idea for a company that would tackle this subset of elder care at her grandmother’s memorial service. Her aunt, in her mid-50s, had coordinated all of her grandmother’s care. “I realized she had silently paid the cost and broken inside as a result of that journey,” Lee says. “There was a huge personal sacrifice. It had cost a part of herself.” The family had access to excellent physical care for its matriarch—but the full-time job of navigating it all still weighed heavily.
Wealthy families have always been able to pay for such services. These Medicare billing codes for care management made that service more affordable in theory, but physicians haven’t been incentivized to provide that care. Lee and her two cofounders (who are both alums of Palantir) decided to build a company that would function as its own clinic rather than try to change billing behavior of existing primary care providers. Ninety percent of Hera’s customers so far have the care covered fully by Medicare; out of pocket, it’s under $20 an hour. Hera is so far available in seven states, with the goal of operating in 25 by the end of the year. And the founders see their goals as aligned with U.S. policy goals and trends—like reducing hospitalization costs and allowing older adults to stay in their homes longer. Bain estimates that older adults without adequate support are 34% more likely to be hospitalized, driving $37 billion a year in avoidable costs.
With so much talk of how tech and AI will free up people’s time, here is one concrete example. “I want more families to be able to spend time with their parents, with their loved ones, and for that to be quality time—instead of being on hold with Medicaid for two hours or so lost getting seven different home health agency calls,” Lee says. “Creating this new profession and replacing that role the adult daughter has held—she gets to go focus on her career, her family, and important quality time with her parent.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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PARTING WORDS
"When you think about what museums do, we collect the works that often play those roles, or begin to play it much after they ever were created, like the Mona Lisa."
— Guggenheim director Mariët Westermann on displaying Jordyn Woods' lucky bag—which saw the Knicks through their championship—in the museum
