Finnish care platform Helppy has picked up €3 million in a funding round led by Alliance Venture, a Nordic venture capital firm that has previously invested in unicorn-valued online grocery company Oda.
Also, the round saw participation from existing investors, including Icebreaker.vc, Johannes Schildt, the Co-Founder and CEO of Kry/Livi and Elias Aalto, the Co-Founder of Wolt that backed Helppy in the pre-seed round.
European expansion on cards
As per the company, it has raised €3.5 million to date, after bootstrapping for 2.5 years. After having proven its capabilities in Finland, Helppy is now expanding its operations to multiple European countries.
Alongside the investment, Helppy strengthens its team by naming the former Swappie Head of DACH region Lauri Tevilin to head the expansion in Europe.
Richard Nordström, Founder & CEO of Helppy said, “We believe that our type of model will be adopted by a significant part of the home care market in the next few years, and help solve the ongoing nurse shortage. We’re seeing this happening already in the US, but now also emerging in Europe. The home care market only in Europe is worth over €100billion and growing 8% annually. With the new funding we’re launching operations now in several markets in Central Europe.”
“Helppy has completely redesigned the home care model, allowing them to provide better care and better experience for all parties involved. Their model is unique and can solve many of the problems the ageing population in Europe faces from nurse shortage to the rising demand for care services”, said Anders Hallin, Partner of Alliance VC.
“Helppy’s team has succeeded in developing technology that revolutionizes the quality of the care for the customer. Coming from Finland and having proven their concept in the world’s most developed care market, we see that Helppy can make a real impact on the elderly care system in Europe”, said Riku Seppälä, a Founding Partner of Icebreaker.vc.
“Traditionally, the caregivers and service providers are like a black box to family members. It’s a big competitive advantage to create a meaningful, trustworthy and transparent relationship with family members”, said Elias Aalto, who both led the development of Wolt’s user experience and co-founded the company.
“Helppy innovates elderly care by using technology to make it more continuous, personal and tailored to each individual’s needs. We need great teams who develop our welfare services and Helppy injects innovation into this much-needed part of healthcare, elderly care”, said Johannes Schildt, the Co-Founder of Kry.
How was Helppy born?
Helppy was founded by Richard Nordström in 2018 in Helsinki and is building next-gen elderly home care. The idea of Helppy arose when the founder and CEO’s mother suddenly fell ill and he had to seek care for her mother. This is when he realised that the care was too hard to organise and the service is like a black box to the family member.
To date, Helppy has helped nearly a thousand families in Finland and attracted over 5,000 nurses and personal assistants to sign up on the platform and offer their help to seniors in need.
Neighbourhood care model
Its neighbourhood care model, which is empowered by tech, is a new alternative to elderly home care. The model uses platform logistics and allows for more personal care, full transparency and higher productivity than the traditional route-based shift worker model.
Its platform lets the senior to be visited by familiar helpers. Using Helppy, the family member gets personal, trustworthy and affordable help for the aging parent, hassle-free.
