Age Up Health are an Aged Care Provider offering a more flexible approach to in-home support.
Age Up Health combines SaaS with service delivery to provide dependable, reliable, and consistent in-home care. Focusing on the health and individual needs of their clients, they take a person-centred and flexible approach to home care.
Founder Grace Petherick,
“I firmly believe that to truly deliver quality, holistic aged care you have to employ and train your own care staff and manage your own workforce. I don’t think that you can separate the delivery of care from the technology offering, because ultimately we are in the business of caring and that’s an intrinsically human thing.”
The idea for the business was formed from Grace’s personal experience. When her grandparent’s health started to deteriorate, the family looked at options to support them to keep living at home. But the family had a horrendous experience with one of the big religious aged care providers who took her grandparents money and stopped answering the phone. Despite multiple requests, the services never came, and her grandparents ended up thousands of dollars out of pocket awaiting reimbursements and waiting weeks on end for someone to return their calls.
Grace was shocked at how her grandparents were being treated and knew she could do better. So, she quit her job, withdrew her savings (much to the dismay of her partner) and Age Up Health was born.
Age Up Health was totally bootstrapped for the first 12 months. But the business started generating income quite early and in October 2020, Age Up Health was accepted into Skalata Ventures’ Seed program which delivered additional funding.
Along the way, there were a lot of barriers to accessing funding. Many investors didn’t share Grace’s vision and were looking for the next big pure software company that scaled easily. They were concerned about the challenges involved with managing quality supply and scaling human resources.
That didn’t stop Grace…
“While I understand their reservations, I say- if it isn’t hard to do then there wouldn’t be any need for a disruptor like us!”
Today, Age Up Health is financially self-sufficient and they are free to put the funding from Tractor towards growth and innovation.
For Grace, fundraising was an incredibly time and energy consuming pursuit. As a solo founder, taking months away from the company to raise funding was detrimental and not a great use of her time. Especially considering Age Up Health had been revenue-generating right from the start. In the first year alone, there was a 4000% growth, so it was easy to see that what they were doing was working, they just needed some capital to take that enviable success and replicate it.
“Frankly I didn’t want to ‘give up my baby’ by giving away too much equity early on - I work too damn hard to just give it away at an early-stage valuation.”
Grace had worked with Tractor Ventures Co-Founder and COO Jodie Imam at SBE (Springboard Enterprises Australia) and knew that she wanted to work with her again.
But that was just one of the benefits of Tractor.
“Tractor added so much value - in particular the advisory piece. Having expert advisors on call is worth every penny! It also has the added advantage of giving good structure to the way we operate - having that regular cadence helps me to develop as a professional and an executive, and ensures I have really good oversight even in these early stages of the life of the company.”
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