Senior Care Startup DUOS Raises $15 Million to Fuel Tech Advancements, Growth

Senior care startup DUOS introduced Tuesday that it has lifted $15 million in a Series A.

The spherical was led by Imaginary Ventures, with participation from current traders Forerunner Ventures, Declaration Companions, and a new investor, Optum Ventures.

The $15 million is a considerable mark for the organization, which sees alone in a new stage just after the round, Karl Ulfers, co-founder and CEO of DUOS, told Home Overall health Treatment News.

“DUOS, from a seed spherical point of view, had huge investors amongst Redesign Wellbeing and Forerunner, but that spherical was more in the $6 million selection,” he said. “It was a good spherical. It propelled us to exactly where we are nowadays, but this Sequence A is undoubtedly our most sizeable spherical to date.”

Introduced in 2021, New York-based DUOS helps location pro particular assistants — “Duos” — into the houses of seniors. The enterprise works directly with customers, as perfectly as with payer and supplier organizations.

The not long ago elevated money is earmarked for fueling both the company’s technologies progress and expansion options, Ulfers said.

“The funding itself will be utilised to go on to establish out our extraordinary staff from a products engineering and design standpoint,” he reported. “In conditions of what we’re concentrated on with them, we definitely want to be a leader in technology for the older grownup and caregiving area.”

Particularly, DUOS will place funds in the direction of two critical places.

A person of these spots is taking the tools the enterprise has designed to allow for its “Duos” assistants to support seniors and externalizing these abilities so that loved ones caregivers can also faucet into them through an app. The 2nd spot has to do with the company’s partnerships.

“We see this brilliant option in phrases of the products and services that we tap into — so feel of transportation, feel of scheduling appointments, believe of supporting prepare foods, helping with matters all around the more mature adult’s household,” Ulfers said. “We are actively introducing companions into our enterprise that will allow for us to combine them into our technological innovation to go the remaining mile.”

As a rather new company, DUOS has presently started earning headway when it will come to building these partnerships.

It has shaped interactions with a number of overall health insurance options, like Magellan Health care, Geisinger Well being System and other national and regional payers and companies in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Ga.

DUOS’ benefit-increase to its partners is its means to fulfill the desires of seniors in the wake of Medicare Advantage’s expansion of household-based supplemental rewards and Medicare’s development of Social Safety Disability Insurance (SSDI).

“What that ultimately drives for our system partners is a direct effect relative to their star rankings, as nicely as their all round gratification with their members, to help keep them in their Medicare Edge strategy,” Ulfers claimed.

On its close, Ulfers calls these partnerships “mission-critical” to the company’s general development. They also give the firm a broader achieve and affect.

“These partnerships shell out for our providers and then make it possible for us the means to specifically market and activate more mature older people, as effectively as their caregivers that are in require of our services,” he stated. “If we didn’t have these partnerships, the only other angle we’d have is our immediate-to-shopper design. That’s just a much more durable product in terms of growing and scaling the organization as opposed to placing these big and strategic partnerships.”

Even though lots of startups have entered the senior care market purporting to be “disrupters” in the space, DUOS eventually views its placement in the business as the “connective tissue.”

“We like to imagine of ourselves as coming into this room to act as the supplemental connective tissue that will seriously unleash a ton of the existing products and services that have been there for older grown ups that probably weren’t effortlessly utilized,” Ulfers said.