Will Donnelly: “I moved back in with my parents to fund Lottie”

Back in 2021, we featured a humble newborn startup in our ‘Just Started’ section. Lottie’s founders spoke enthusiastically about how their team of five would better “support care seekers”. Just over three years later, the social care titan has been crowned winner of the 2025 Startups 100 Index, to join an elite list of alumni including UK startup royalty, Revolut.

“It’s so cool,” co-founder Will Donnelly enthuses. “I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and have been an avid reader of Startups 100 for as long as I can remember.”

Told via newspaper clippings, Lottie’s is a super-charged growth story. In some respects, though, the business has existed for almost ten years. It originated as a niggling frustration nurtured by Donnelly during his six year career in social care, when he discovered an “offline, fragmented, and underfunded sector with next to no consumer transparency”.

Digitalisation is a buzz word in healthcare today. But Donnelly – and his brother and co-founder, Chris – saw firsthand how desperately it was needed. Add in some customer surveys to confirm the duo’s instincts, and a business plan began to form.

“Families were contacting, on average, six services before finding a high quality provider that fit their budget requirements”, Donnelly tells Startups. “We decided to make it compulsory for listings on Lottie to showcase their service availability and fees”.

I’ve been an avid reader of Startups 100 as long as I can remember.

The brothers launched Lottie, a B2C platform to match consumers with care homes, in 2021. Coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cracks within the system had become jarring, paving the way for new and disruptive tech. “I was so excited to get going and to start making a difference to families”, says Donnelly. But the birth was not without challenges.

Donnelly’s dad was a business owner himself, and the family was supportive. Which was lucky, given the part the clan would play in Lottie’s story. “I moved back in with my parents at 25 years old and took out a £10k loan to fund the first six months of Lottie”, Donnelly reveals.

That was year one. Since 2023, the brothers have launched a suite of solutions including CRM software, an employee benefits platform, a data insights tool, and most recently, a home-care marketplace, securing it a foothold in every later life care type.

Incredibly, Lottie is now the UK’s first directory of vetted care providers with transparent fees and service availability. With 5,000 partners onboarded so far, Donnelly says over 20 million families have been able to fathom, find, or fund later life care via the Lottie marketplace.

I moved in with my parents to fund the first six months of Lottie.

In startups terms, Lottie is also in its senior years. As a leader in the stagnant global care market, though, Donnelly knows it must keep moving to trigger a real digital revolution. That mission statement became more urgent at the start of this month, when the government announced reforms to transform adult social care. Reforms that will not begin until 2028.

Donnelly is supportive of the plans to address the crisis, as he has been for the past decade and a half. “These proposals date back to Gordon Brown and 15 years later, we’ve witnessed very little real progress”, he laments. “We need to see change starting from today, not when we are likely to start talking about the next general election”.

Meanwhile, Lottie has already taken on the mantle as changemaker. With legislative change still slow, it will be an uphill battle. Still, its founders’ determination seems boundless. It has already secured them the Startups 100 gold medal. What is the secret to such tenacity?

“I’d honestly say half the battle of running a business is finding something that you’re generally passionate about and can spend 10+ years devoting your life to”, Donnelly admits.

“What’s kept me going, especially in the tough times, is my unwavering passion for helping families and my deep desire to fix the world’s broken social care industry.”

Lottie has been named the winner of the 2025 Startups 100 Index. See who else made the list and will be leading the charge for industry change and innovation this year.