CareYaya, a platform that matches individuals who want caregivers with healthcare college students, is working to disrupt the caregiving business. The startup, which exhibited as a part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is seeking to improve reasonably priced in-home assist, whereas additionally serving to college students put together for his or her future healthcare careers.
The startup was based in 2022 by Neal Shah, who got here up with the thought for the startup based mostly on his personal expertise as a caregiver for his spouse after she turned sick with most cancers and varied different illnesses. Throughout this time, Shah was a companion at a hedge fund and needed to wind down his fund to turn out to be a full-time caregiver for 2 years.
To get extra take care of his spouse, Shah employed faculty college students who have been learning healthcare to be caregivers for his spouse. Shah realized that different households have been doing the identical factor informally by posting flyers at native campuses to seek out somebody who was certified to take care of their liked one.
“I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to just build a formal system for them to do it, where you don’t have to go to your local nursing school or your local undergrad campus and post flyers,” Shah informed TechCrunch. “This is what I was doing. So we were like, if you can bring that into a formal capacity through a tech platform, you can make a big impact.”
Quick-forward to 2024, and the platform now has over 25,000 college students on its platform from quite a few faculties, together with Duke College, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, College of Texas at Austin, and extra.
CareYaya performs background checks on college students who wish to be a part of the platform after which completes video-based interviews with them. On the person facet, individuals can be a part of the platform after which element the kind of care their liked one wants. CareYaya then matches college students to households, whether or not it’s for one-off periods or steady care. After the primary session, each events can go away scores.
The startup says it will probably assist households save hundreds of {dollars} on recurring senior care. Whereas at-home care prices a median of $35 per hour within the U.S., CareYaya costs between $17 and $20 per hour.
For the reason that college students offering the care are tech savvy, CareYaya is equipping them with AI-powered expertise to acknowledge and monitor illness development in sufferers with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The corporate lately launched an LLM (massive language mannequin) that integrates with good glasses to collect visible knowledge to assist college students present higher real-time help and conduct early dementia screening.
By way of the long run, CareYaya needs to discover increasing past the USA, because the platform has seen curiosity from individuals in locations like Canada, Australia, and the UK.
