OnCare has raised £1.1M in total. We talk with Alistair Cohen, its CEO.
PetaCrunch: How would you describe OnCare in a single tweet?
Alistair Cohen: OnCare is digitising social care to make care easier, cheaper and more transparent, and make sure everyone has access to the best possible care.
PC: How did it all start and why?
AC: I actually started working on OnCare at the corporate-backed incubator Founders Factory. I was a Product Manager there, and after Aviva and Founders Factory identified the elderly care sector as a lucrative sector with very little technology, I was given the brief: ‘go and fix elderly care somehow with technology, and build a company in 6 months that makes it better somehow’. I set about understanding the needs of care agencies, care workers, clients and their families and realised that the main source of everyone’s issues was the amount of care delivery processes that were still managed on paper. Jump to more like 9 months later, and we had a first version of our OnCare reporting product live – helping care workers to report on their visits digitally, keeping families engaged through text message updates on each visit, and allowing care agencies to see all the visit reports and alerts coming in live. I then took the leap and (with the support of Founders Factory) actually left Founders Factory to become the CEO of OnCare rather than hand it on to an external team. By that point I had fallen in love with the problem space, and carried a lot of knowledge and some horror stories from friends and family that I couldn’t just hand over to someone else. So, not your typical start up founder story but one where I was given the freedom and time to really dig deep into the sector and do my research properly before building the first product, which has set us on an amazing path since.
PC: What have you achieved so far?
AC: I’ve built up a team of 8 other amazing people who all share the same desire to work really hard on solving some big societal problems. We’re now supporting over 100 care agencies around the country, over 1000 care workers, and from a recent NPS survey where we scored 55, our customers seem to love what we’re doing. We’ve closed over £900,000 in equity funding, and are currently seeking more investment to really supercharge our growth and move us to the next phase of our business plan.
PC: How will you use your recent funding round?
AC: Once we close the round, we’re aiming to use the funds to take over a significant share of the UK care market, and make sure revenues are where they need to be for a decent series A. As with any sector, the key to success is to grab the market before your competitors. Now we’ve proven out the product really solves problems for care providers, and have honed our sales process, we’re poised to do just that. So essentially it will be used for a fairly aggressive amount of hiring, marketing, and product development.
PC: What do you plan to achieve in the next 2-3 years?
AC: The next phase for us is really the opening and growth of our care marketplace. We know that families struggle to find the right care providers locally and care providers struggle to market themselves effectively. So, our care marketplace will solve these problems for both parties, and open up new revenue streams for us. Beyond that, it will be looking internationally, and seeing how we can help more care providers to deliver better care outside of the UK.
