UK home healthcare provider Cera raises $150 million to expand its AI platform

Public health systems around the world are struggling to recover post-pandemic, and increasingly aging populations in Western countries in particular are putting pressure on services, not least in the UK.NHS in crisis’ is a regular headline in the press. As a result, many technology-equipped private companies see a gap in the market. It is with this background Ceraa UK-based custom software platform and home healthcare provider, has raised $150 million in a mix of debt and equity. The company said most of it was debt, but declined to give a breakdown and also contested its valuation.

The round was led by funds associated with BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capital to expand Cera’s platform. The company says it’s highly AI-driven with proprietary modeling based on its own data, though it admits it uses aspects of both Google’s Gemini AI platform and Microsoft’s version of ChatGPT.

Cera in 2022 raised The $320m (£260m) round of equity and debt funding was split roughly 50/50.

It has 14 investors, according to CrunchBase. Notable equity investors to date include Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth. London Accelerator and long-time UK investor Robin Klein.

A Cera spokesperson added that although this is not yet reflected in the publicly released accounts, the company is EBITA positive in 2023 and free cash flow positive in 2024 and is “an increasingly self-sustaining business”, so can also increase this debt.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Cera founder and CEO Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE said: “We’re on the way to profitability, and we’ve had very significant attrition in how we use our technology and AI, and we’ve expanded into more services. at home.”

Cera caregivers use its app to plan their work and record patient symptoms. Using AI modeling, Cera is then able to take unstructured data (such as “the patient fell at night,” etc.) and use it to predict the potential for patients to be at greater risk of illness or injury. The company claims this has resulted in up to a 70% reduction in hospital admissions, a 20% reduction in patient falls and hospital discharges up to five times faster.

The company has raised more than $407 million in a mix of equity and debt to date.

Competitors in the UK include Home Instead and Bluebird Care, which use non-proprietary software to guide their staff. The closest comparisons to Cera in the US include Signify Health and CVS Health, both of which were acquired by Nasdaq-listed CVS Health. Another is Honor raised $625 million to date.

Maruthappu said: “We are putting pressure on the NHS and supporting it to have more capacity to look after other patients. We have also expanded into other service lines such as nursing services, physiotherapy, learning disabilities, physical disabilities and home mental health services. So we’re a more comprehensive healthcare provider at home.”

He also said that the AI-driven aspect of the business is based on the data it collects: “Another major advantage is what we’re doing with technology, more specifically with AI… We capture patient data from those visits in our app. this has now given us one of the largest home health datasets in the world, certainly the largest in Europe, and we’ve been able to analyze this dataset in many different ways to build algorithms, algorithms. Tell someone to fall before him.”

“We can predict more than 80% of falls a week before they happen. This is statistically significant… So we reduce falls by over 20% thanks to our AI algorithm… We can also re-predict about 83% of hospitalizations a week before they happen… hospitalizations by 70% we can reduce it to “.

Rob Platek, partner and global head of credit at BDT & MSD, said in a statement: “Cera has achieved strong growth through its ability to leverage technology to deliver exceptional care. We believe that Cera is well positioned to further expand its business.”

Cera says it is the UK’s largest non-NHS healthcare provider, covering around 30 million people with 10,000 carers and nurses and working with more than 150 local authorities and two-thirds of NHS Integrated Care Systems.

It also claims that Cera’s AI-powered home healthcare model is saving the UK healthcare system £1 million a day in an independent analysis by a British consultancy.

Cera clearly wants to avoid tarnishing healthcare startups like Babylon Health. bankrupt and was sold for parts after just trying to do health via a chatbot.