18. Birdie

Founders: Max Parmentier, Abeed Mohamed, Rajiv Tanna, Gwen Lecalvez
Founded: 2017
Website: birdie.care

The UK’s care sector is in crisis. Over 500,000 adults are currently awaiting care, and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the industry remain vacant. This pressure restricts the service that providers can deliver, affecting the quality of care our loved ones receive.

When it comes to tackling this mounting crisis, Birdie believes it has a way forward. Birdie provides care professionals with a simple digital solution, which bolsters efficiency and enables care providers to scale. The goal is to alleviate pain points, and let providers and staff focus on the most important part of their roles – providing genuinely impactful later life care.

Cofounder Max Parmentier is rightly ambitious about the potential of Birdie’s impact on its sector. “Birdie aims to transform the way we age,” Parmentier says. “It can enable more people the opportunity to remain happy, healthy, and independent in their own homes.”

The company’s story has deeply personal beginnings. Parmentier’s grandfather died unhappily in a care facility, and Parmentier felt frustrated at the lack of possibilities for people to grow old in the dignity of their own homes. He later met chief product officer Rajiv Tanna, who had also been researching technology’s role in the care sector after his own grandfather died. The pair’s obsession with the problem led to the launch of Birdie.

Birdie can enable more people the opportunity to remain happy, healthy, and independent in their own homes.

Birdie’s service includes a mobile app for on-the-ground care professionals, so they can document visits, and a web app for in-office providers to manage operations. It also offers an app for family members, keeping them updated on their loved ones’ care and helping to reassure them during times of stress.

For carers, the app puts client information at their fingertips, and helps them to easily communicate with other healthcare professionals. Testament to its success is a healthy 4.7/5 Trustpilot rating, with hundreds of positive reviews from care professionals.

Of course, any service can offer an app. But, with Birdie, data integration is the key differentiator that sets its product apart.

Birdie’s software uses open APIs to enable full integration. This means that the data it collects is treated as a single source – driving efficiency, preventing overlap, and allowing the service to meet demand.

The app puts client information at their fingertips, and helps them to easily communicate with other healthcare professionals.

At the heart of all of this is Birdie’s “clinical engine”. This aims to derive predictive insights about care recipients’ health. In turn, this can allow primary and secondary healthcare professionals to make better, more informed decisions early on.

One of the ways Birdie helps care professionals improve efficiency is through providing actionable data-led insights. Millions of data points relating to medication schedules, incident reports, and other variables are collected each month by carers. As a result, Birdie’s dataset is one of the largest in Europe – an achievement the team is extremely proud of.

The business secured a £25m Series B investment in 2022, which will allow Birdie to continue accelerating its product development and even expanding its international reach.

Over the next five years, Birdie hopes to have expanded from the UK into Europe. It’s already signed new partners in Spain, and the team is now looking at opportunities to expand into other countries experiencing increased pressure from ageing populations, such as Ireland, France, and Germany.

With the care crisis going nowhere fast, the time is ripe for an innovative business with values driven by personal experience to shake up the sector, and most importantly, offer great service to adults in later life.