AI startup Zingage has raised $12.5 million in seed funding to help bring healthcare inside the home — a shift it says will occur over the next decade.
The two-year-old startup is developing an AI-powered scheduling and operations product for home healthcare agencies, which send caregivers into people’s homes for aid — as opposed to a hospital or long-term facility.
Patients aren’t receiving care because agencies are bogged down by offline logistics, cofounder and CEO Victor Hunt told Business Insider, while workers in the field are cobbling together hours to make a living wage.
“We want all healthcare to be deployed in the home — from basic personal care companionship to skilled nursing to hospital at home to the ability to provide more remote patient monitoring,” Hunt said.
He said doing so will “reduce hospitalizations, improve care outcomes, extend lifespans, and make it possible for people to age in place.”
The New York City-based startup was cofounded by Hunt and Daniel Tian at the tech community South Park Commons. Hunt said the idea for Zingage stemmed from personal experience.
Hunt, who formerly cofounded real estate tech company Astorian, told Business Insider his mother required home aid following an assault and that his grandmother started her own home healthcare company. Tian, a former engineer at Ramp and TikTok who is Zingage’s CTO, struggled to find steady care for his grandfather with Alzheimer’s.
Hunt told Business Insider that several factors are causing healthcare to move homeward. The traditional family unit is dissolving, preventive healthcare is becoming increasingly important, and older adults — the fastest-growing age group in America — want to age in place.
Bessemer Venture Partners led Zingage’s seed round, which featured participation from TQ Ventures, South Park Commons, and executives from Ramp.
Zingage has two products. Zingage Perform, which Hunt likened to “Candy Crush for work,” is an engagement product to increase retention that applauds caregivers for taking extra shifts or accepting long-term jobs.
Zingage Operator, which launched out of beta roughly two months ago, is an app that automatically runs back-office tasks for home agencies, including intake, scheduling, billing, filling shifts, fielding urgent requests, and ensuring visits are properly documented.
Zingage has 14 employees, two-thirds of whom are engineers. It has 400 agency clients employing roughly 50,000 caregivers to date across both products.
Other startups like Axle Health are also using AI to tackle home healthcare.
Here’s a look at the pitch deck Zingage used to raise its $12.5 million seed. Some slides have been removed so that the deck can be shared publicly.
Read the full article here
