SumUp Impact Fund announces first Venture Investment into marta
marta, the European digital platform for live-in care, announces a €6.6 million Seed round led by Capnamic, alongside co-lead Almaz Capital. GMPVC, Ithaca, SumUp Impact Fund, Verve Ventures and renowned business angels also participated in the round. Existing investors include some of the most prominent German entrepreneurs and business angels Christian Vollmann, Johannes Schaback, Laura Esnola, Dr. Steffen Zoller and Julian Stiefel. The fresh funding will be used to expand the core team in Germany, Poland, Romania and Lithuania and scale up business processes – driven by the mission to set new standards for more affordable, transparent, and reliable live-in care.
marta is changing the way elderly care is offered today, tackling the €18B market in the DACH region alone. Germany alone has more than 4m elderly seeking at-home care, while only 280.000 caregivers work in the ambulant care sector. This huge imbalance creates an opportunity for over 600.000 live-in caregivers from CEE countries to come to Germany to fill the gap.
With its algorithm-based marketplace, marta solves the most pressing problem in live-in care, namely the usually poor fit between careseekers and caregivers. marta’s data-driven approach ensures successful matchmaking and significantly decreases costs and complexity for families seeking care for their elderly relatives while increasing caregivers’ ability to negotiate the terms of their contract and their earnings. Emphasizing transparency and the human sides of the experience, marta aims to improve the quality of elderly care and addresses a pressing societal issue at the same time.
All around the world, families with relatives in need of care and, on the other side, caregivers themselves are facing similar hardships: organizing care is difficult and time-consuming, the market is fragmented and lacks transparency, legal security and expert guidance. Yet, as the worldwide population ages, elderly care is becoming increasingly important. Existing solutions for elderly care can involve as many as 6 intermediaries, which means information critical to matching caregivers with careseekers is usually ignored or lost in the process. Four out of five placements fail as a result, an unsustainably high breakdown rate that leads to distress, confusion and frustration among all involved. marta’s platform leverages data and a proprietary matching algorithm which creates a self-service platform that eliminates such avoidable failures entirely.
“There are hundreds of examples of how elderly care can go wrong and it’s almost impossible for humans to accurately predict placement success. There are simply too many requirements, skills and preferences on both sides to consider. We have seen how difficult it was to organize care with our grandparents. Aging is a natural process and we must have the tools and skills to manage it appropriately. We believe that we can leverage technology significantly to help elderly people and their families as well as the caregivers,” said Jan Hoffmann, co-founder of marta.
marta enables its customers to make their own choices around live-in care. Seniors can decide with whom they want to live. Families have peace of mind knowing that the contractor, who comes into their home has been verified and has been rated by staff and other families before. Caregivers have the opportunity to choose a household based on detailed, verified case information, including photos of the housing arrangement. In addition to the matching function, marta has developed several features to automate the caregivers’ backoffice, enabling them to manage their registration, insurances, invoices and taxes through the platform. Caregivers are thus free to focus on what they do best: providing high-quality care.
“marta has created a transparent marketplace that connects caregivers directly with families seeking care. At this point a truly unique approach based on digitization. We have been following marta for the past months and are impressed by the technology and traction the team has delivered. Most importantly, we are excited about the teams’ enthusiasm for solving a paramount societal problem,” said Jörg Binnenbrücker, Founding Partner at Capnamic.
Philipp Buhr and Jan Hoffmann, marta’s founders, discovered the care industry in a similar way most people do: their grandparents needed care and they were in charge of finding a live-in caregiver. In a complicated, overpriced market, both searched for five years to find a decent agency to work with before their frustration led them to launch marta in 2020 and build what they were looking for themselves. 18 months after launch, marta is active in four countries, and has cumulatively provided at-home care services to over thousand customers and caregivers.
Source cosmyc Partners
