Papa
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Papa co-founder lands seed funding for a second swing in eldercare: UpsideHōM
Jake Rothstein is the co-founder of Papa, a Miami-based company that offers care and companionship to seniors. The business, which pairs elderly Americans with uncertified-yet-vetted pals, helps offer casual services, such as technology support, grocery delivery or even a fun conversation. It has raised upwards of $91 million in venture capital to date.
While Rothstein left day to day responsibilities at Papa in 2017, his experience there gave him a deeper look into the priorities of older adults and families as they go through the aging journey. While Papa was about meeting the elderly where they are, the co-founder began to think of a more complex question: What if “where they are” isn’t as supportive as it should be 24/7?
After a stint at another tech company, Rothstein launched a more modern take on senior living communities in January 2020, alongside co-worker turned co-founder Peter Badgley. UpsideHōM is a fully managed, tech-enabled living space for older adults in the United States. After a year of beta testing, the duo announced today that they have raised a $2.25 million seed round for UpsideHōM, led by Triple Impact Capital and Freestyle Capital, with participation from Techstars.
Alongside the funding, UpsideHōM announced its next big bet, dubbed a relaunch, that will sit atop furnished and furnished apartments that sit throughout Raleigh, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Tampa and South Florida: a software platform to take out all the clutter from move-in and maintenance. The platform will give residents one spot to chat with their house manager, pay bills and access perks such as on-demand tech support, house-keeping and companion visits thanks to a partnership with Papa. The company also offers add-on services and amenities, including freshly prepared meals, grocery delivery, fitness programming and accompanied transportation.
Image Credits: UpsideHōM
Part of UpsideHōM’s focus is in creating personalized solutions. Elders are diverse in age, needs and financial circumstances — which means the turnkey solution needs to be easily adaptable to service needs when they pop up. The company needs to be careful though: It can’t offer traditional caregiver services due to state by state compliance; instead Rothstein describes the offerings as supportive services, not in replacement of health assistant caregivers.
Image Credits: UpsideHoM
When the company first launched, it was betting on a more unconventional idea.
“I thought, let’s solve loneliness even more completely than what Papa is doing by building in companionship,” Rothstein said, instead of letting people order it on demand. The company decided to offer roommate matching services for elders as one of its core services, alongside the aforementioned supported living characteristics. It didn’t fully stick. Over half of inbound participants responded to the marketing efforts by saying that they liked the idea, but didn’t want to share the space. Today, 50% of UpsideHōM’s business covers individuals or people with spouses or significant others; the other half covers those looking to share units.
The synergies between UpsideHōM and Papa, Rothstein’s previous company, are clear beyond an overlapping customer base. Papa offered up to and almost including actual care, stopping at traditional care-giving services, which require their own vetting and compliance measures. UpsideHōM offers up to and almost including traditional senior living services, but gives supportive services instead of assisted living services, which similarly have their own logistic hurdles to figure out.
As for why Rothstein didn’t just launch supportive living services as a new product vertical within his earlier company, he chalked it up to the “tremendous” opportunity in the former, which warranted it’s own company. He also said that customer acquisition looks different between the two companies.
“At Papa, what we found was that acquiring customers in this space was incredibly challenging [so we went through] the Medicare Advantage route,” he said. “But senior living is a completely different segment.”
The millions in new venture capital money are coming as UpsideHōM prepares for aggressive growth. While the company did not disclose revenue or total residents, it did say it has hit 1,000% in new resident headcount in the first half of 2021 as a vague proxy. As the startup prepares for its next phase of growth, the co-founders will need to focus heavily on sustainable customer acquisition.
Rothstein thinks that downsizing elders into homes that work for them is a simple argument to make.
“You can age in place for as long as it’s practical, but there’s going to be a day and time when it’s not [going to] be practical,” Rothstein said. “Why would you want to make this decision after you’ve broken your hip, after you run out of money or after your spouse died?”
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story wrote that Rothstein had spent six years scaling Papa. This is incorrect. He left in 2017 but remains an investor in the company.
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YC-grad Papa raises $2.4M for its ‘grandkids-on-demand’ service
One of the latest additions to the on-demand economy is Papa, a mobile app that connects college students with adults over 60 in need of support and companionship.
The recent graduate of Y Combinator’s accelerator program has raised a $2.4 million round of funding to expand its service throughout Florida and to five additional states next year, beginning with Pennsylvania. Initialized Capital led the round, with participation from Sound Ventures.
Headquartered in Miami, the startup was founded last year by chief executive officer Andrew Parker. The idea came to him while he was juggling a full-time job at a startup and caring for his grandfather, who had early onset dementia.
“I’ve always been a connector of humans,” Parker, the former vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE, told TechCrunch. “I’ve always naturally felt comfortable with all walks of life and all age groups and have just felt human connection is really critical.”
Seniors can request a “Papa Pal” using the company’s mobile app, desktop site or by phone. The pals can pick them up and take them out for an activity or have them over to play a game, complete household chores, teach them how to use social media and other technology or simply to chat. A senior is matched with a student, who must complete a “rigorous” background check, in as little as 30 seconds.
Parker says there are 600 students working with Papa an average of 25 hours per month.
“We’ve been fortunate that this is something the students really want to be part of,” he said. “They aren’t doing this for a couple extra dollars. They are doing this to help the community.”
The service costs seniors $20 per hour, $12 of which is paid to the students and $8 is returned to Papa. It’s not a subscription-based service, but seniors can pay for a premium option that lets them choose between three Papa Pals instead of being randomly paired with one of the several hundred options. The students do not provide any personal care, like bathing or grooming. And they are not a pick-up and drop-off service, like Uber or Lyft.
“We believe the Papa team has found a unique way to combat loneliness and depression in older adults,” said Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, in a statement. “The experience that Papa Pals bring their members make it seem like they are part of a family.”
In addition to expanding to new markets, Papa is in the process of partnering with insurance companies with a goal of allowing seniors to pay for some of its services through their Medicare plans.
“Loneliness is a crisis. It’s a disease. It’s killing people prematurely,” Parker said. “We are providing a really massive impact to these people’s lives.”
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