As our population ages, this startup is turning housing into a platform for the gig economy – TechCrunch

As the population of developed countries continues to age, healthcare is rapidly being digitized and “platformed” to meet the enormous scale of change that lies ahead. I recently covered as Cera in the UK just raised $320m to bring patient monitoring to the home rather than overcrowded hospitals.

Now another startup aims to create an almost “gig economy”-style platform for people who provide care for the elderly, this time in Europe.

Martha, the European digital platform for care for elderly relatives, says that when people try to arrange such care for their elderly relatives, there are up to six intermediaries involved, and four out of five placements fail. Martha’s Solution is a matching AI-powered platform for finding caregivers for job vacancies. I guess you could call it UpWork for home care?

It has now raised a seed round of €6.6 million led by Capnamic and Almaz Capital. Ithaca, GMPVC, SumUp Impact Fund, Verve Ventures and angels also participated. Existing investors such as Christian Vollmann, Johannes Schabak, Laura Esnola, Dr. Steffen Zoller and Julian Stiefel also participated.

Now the startup plans to expand its European markets to Germany, Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

The market it addresses is €18 billion in the DACH region alone.

Considering that in Germany alone more than 4 million people apply for home care and only 280,000 carers can do it, the market is significant.

Marta’s says its algorithm-based marketplace matches help-seekers and caregivers, increasing transparency and human-to-human interaction.

“There are hundreds of examples of how aged care can go wrong, and it’s almost impossible for people to accurately predict placement success because it’s so much data. We saw how difficult it was to arrange care with our grandparents. Aging is a normal process that should not cause serious problems. We believe we can use technology in a big way to help seniors and their families, as well as those who care for them,” Jan Hoffman, co-founder of marta, said in a statement.

Marta founders Philip Burr and Hoffmann started Marta in 2020 after having trouble finding guardians for relatives.

“Marta has created a transparent marketplace where she connects caregivers directly with families seeking help. At the moment, a truly unique approach based on digitization. We’ve been following Marta for the past few months and are impressed with the technology and drive the team has brought. Most importantly, we are thrilled with the teams’ enthusiasm in solving a critical societal problem,” Jörg Binnenbrucker, Capnamic Founding Partner, said in a statement.