Around the world, public healthcare systems have struggled to recover post-pandemic, and in particular, increasingly aging populations in Western countries are putting pressure on services, not least in the UK where the ‘NHS in crisis’ is a regular headline in the media. . As a result, private companies, highly equipped with technology, see a gap in the market. It is against this background that Cera, a proprietary software platform and home healthcare provider in the UK, has raised $150 million in a mix of debt and equity. The company said most of that is debt, but declined to give a breakdown and also downplayed its valuation.
The round was led by associated funds BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capital in order to expand Cera’s platform. The company says this is heavily AI-driven, with proprietary modeling based on its own data, though it admits it uses some aspects of Google’s Gemini AI platform as well as Microsoft’s version of ChatGPT.
In 2022, Cera raised $320m (£260m) in an equity and debt funding round split roughly 50/50.
According to CrunchBase there are 14 investors. Notable equity investors to date include Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth. London Accelerator and long-time UK investor Robin Klein.
A Cera spokesperson added that although this has not yet been reflected in publicly filed accounts, the company was EBITA positive in 2023 and became free cash flow positive in 2024 and is “increasingly a self-sustaining business”. sustainable”, therefore and why it can increase this debt.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder and CEO of Cera, said: “We are moving towards profitability, plus we have a very significant backlog in how we are using our technology and AI, and we have expanded into more services . at home.”
Cera caregivers use its app to plan their work and record patient symptoms. Using its AI modelling, Cera is then able to take that unstructured data (for example “patient fell during the night” etc) and use it to predict the potential for patients to become subject to a greater risk of illness or injury. The company claims this has resulted in up to 70% fewer hospital admissions, a 20% reduction in patient falls and hospital discharges that are up to five times faster, it said in a statement.
The company has raised more than $407 million to date in a mix of equity and debt.
UK competitors include Home Instead and Bluebird Care, which use non-proprietary apps to manage their staff. In the US, the closest comparisons to Cera include Signify Health and CVS Health, both acquired by Nasdaq-listed CVS Health. Another is Honor, which has raised $625 million to date.
Maruthappu said: “We are taking pressure off the NHS and supporting it to have more capacity to care for other patients. We have also expanded into other service lines such as nursing services, physiotherapy, learning disabilities , physical disabilities and providing mental health services in the home as well. So we are a much more comprehensive home health care provider.”
He also said that the AI-driven aspect of the business was based on the data it collects: “The other key advantage is what we’re doing with technology, more specifically with AI… We’re recording patient information from those visits in our app that gives us given now one of the largest home healthcare data sets in the world, certainly the largest in Europe, and we’ve been able to analyze that data set in many different ways to build algorithms, algorithms that have to do with if one wants fall before it falls.”
“We can predict over 80% of crashes a week before they happen. This is statistically significant… So we actually reduce falls by over 20% because of our AI algorithm… We can also predict about 83% of re-hospitalizations a week before they happen.. .reducing hospitalizations by up to 70%,” he said.
In a statement, Rob Platek, partner and global head of credit at BDT & MSD, said: “Cera has achieved strong growth through a demonstrated ability to use technology to deliver exceptional care. We believe Cera is well positioned to further expand its business.”
Cera says it is the UK’s largest non-NHS healthcare provider, covering around 30 million people with 10,000 carers and nurses and working with over 150 local authorities and two-thirds of NHS Integrated Care Systems .
It also claims that an independent analysis carried out by the UK consultancy Faculty found that Cera’s AI-led home healthcare model saves the UK healthcare system £1 million a day.
Cera is obviously keen to avoid the taint of healthcare startups like Babylon Health, obviously a very different business, which went bankrupt and was sold for parts after trying to do healthcare through a simple chatbot.
