Home care technology company Honor has brought in $50 million in Series C financing, the company announced this morning, bringing the company’s total funding to $115 million. The funding round was led by Naspers Ventures, with additional participation from existing investors Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Honor President Nita Sommers told MobiHealthNews that the funding will primarily be used to expand its operations into new regions within California, New Mexico, and Texas, and to continue iterating on its technology.
“I’ve worked in a lot of parts of healthcare, and I think many people that even work in the healthcare environment don’t understand the magnitude of the issue we’re going to face caring for seniors in this country,” Sommers said. “We’re going to double the number of people over the age of 65 and triple the number of people over 80 [by] 2030. So there’s a really huge issue we need to deal with, and to date I feel like there hasn’t been enough focus as an industry on how we are going to deal with all of those things.”
Honor specializes in supporting providers of non-medical home care, a term Sommers used to describe in-home daily living assistance provided by non-specialists for aged or infirm persons. It’s a roughly $30 billion market within the US alone, she said, and one desperately in need of more robust and integrated support as more people live longer lives.
“I’ve worked in my career across pretty much every single part of the healthcare system, but this is the most fragmented market I have found,” Sommers said. “There’s over 21,000 small providers doing this today. Very typically, it is a small mom and pop agency that’s servicing, like, 30 clients with 50 caregivers. It’s a very fragmented industry. That fragmentation has not been ideal for a lot of reasons: it’s hard for consumers to navigate, it’s hard for those caregivers who work in this field to get a lot of infrastructure and support. Now, you start to see a lot of Medicare Advantage plans and ACOs start to think about how to care about this highest-cost population that they have, but it’s not a very easy industry to work with because it is so fragmented.”
Honor hopes to become a national infrastructure network for non-medical home care providers, by partnering with local agencies to offer its care coordination and operations support tech, Sommers explained. Through the Honor Care Network, independent agencies can use the platform to manage their caregiver workforce’s recruiting, payrolls, billing, and related needs, as well as the tools to better integrate a customer’s care into the acute care system if necessary. For the customers themselves, the Honor Care Network features apps and services that can keep families up to date with their loved one’s care.
Currently, Honor’s network operates in the San Francisco, Los Angeles Albuquerque, and Dallas areas, but with the newly announced funding hopes to expand into new markets still within these home states. Sommers also noted that the company was involved in the pilot study of “an in-home device player,” and was open to similar home care technology integrations.
“We started Honor to give our parents the care they need to remain as independent as possible,” Seth Sternberg, CEO of Honor, said in a statement. “As we grew, we quickly saw that the best way to care for older adults at scale is to partner with local agencies and empower them, which is why we launched the Honor Care Network. We’ve seen remarkable progress so far and are excited for the next level, creating the largest, most-informed team of agency partners and caregivers ever assembled.”
The company’s previous funding includes a Series B round that closed in August 2016, and a Series A in April 2015.
