All over the world, public health care systems are struggling to reset post-pandemic, and in particular, the growing elderly population in Western countries is putting pressure on services, especially in the UK where ‘NHS in crisis’ is a regular media headline. As a result, private companies, many driven by technology, see a gap in the market. It is with this background that Waxa proprietary software platform and in-home healthcare provider in the UK, has raised $150 million in a mix of debt and equity. The company said most of it was debt, but declined to give a dividend and also declined to value it.

The round was led by partner funds BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capital to scale Cera’s platform. The company says it is largely driven by AI, with proprietary modeling based on its own data, although it claims to use aspects of Google’s Gemini AI platform as well as Microsoft’s version of ChatGPT.

In 2022 Cera raised $320 million (£260 million) in an equity and debt financing round, split roughly 50/50.

According to CrunchBase it has 14 investors. Acknowledged equity investors to date include Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth. London Accelerator, and long-time UK investor Robin Klein.

A spokesperson for Cera added that although it has not yet seen its publicly filed accounts, the company is EBITA positive in 2023 and free-cashflow positive in 2024, and “is increasingly a business self-sustaining,” so why is it. can raise this round of debt.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Dr Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder & CEO of Cera, said: “We’ve reached profitability, plus we’re very important in how we use our technology and AI, and we’re expanding a lot services at home.”

Cera caregivers use its app to plan their work and log patient symptoms. Using its AI modeling, Cera is now able to take that unstructured data (eg “patient has a night fall” etc.) and use it to predict the potential of patients to be at greater risk. of illness or injury. The company claims it has resulted in reductions in hospitalizations of up to 70%, 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, Cera’s closest competitors include Signify Health and CVS Health, both of which were 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 with more capacity to care for other patients. We are also expanding other service lines such as nursing services, physiotherapy, disabilities in learning, physical disabilities, and also providing mental health services in the home. That’s why we are a very comprehensive home health care provider.”

He also said that the AI-driven aspect of the business is based on the data it collects: “The other key advantage is what we do with technology, especially AI… We log information about patients from of visits to our app. which has given us one of the largest home healthcare data sets in the world, certainly the largest in Europe, and we have been able to analyze the data set in many different ways. ways to make ones algorithm, algorithms that have to do with when someone goes there’s a fall before they do.”

“We can predict more than 80% of falls a week before they happen. That’s statistically significant… So we reduce falls by more than 20% because of our AI algorithm… We can also predict about 83% of re-hospitalizations a week before this happened… the reduction in hospitalizations was 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 its demonstrated ability to use technology to deliver exceptional care. We believe Cera is well positioned to grow 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 more than 150 local authorities and two-thirds of NHS Integrated Care Systems.

It also claims an independent analysis carried out by the UK consultancy Faculty found that Cera’s AI-led home healthcare model saved the UK healthcare system £1 million in one day.

Cera clearly wants to avoid the damage healthcare startups like Babylon Health, which is admittedly a very different business, have done. failure and sold for parts after trying to do healthcare with just a chatbot.