CareYaya enables affordable home care by connecting medical students with seniors

CareYayaa platform connecting people in need of caregivers with medical students, working to introduce changes within the care industry. The startup, which exhibited as a part of Battlefield 200 on the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, wants to offer affordable at-home support while helping students prepare for a future profession in healthcare.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Neal Shah, who got here up with the thought for the startup from his own experiences as a caregiver for his wife after she contracted cancer and various other ailments. At the time, Shah was a partner in a hedge fund and needed to close his fund to function his child’s full-time caregiver for 2 years.

To provide extra care for his wife, Shah hired students studying health care to be his wife’s caregivers. Shah learned that other families were informally doing the identical, posting fliers on local campuses asking them to search out someone qualified to care for his or her loved one.

“I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to just build a formal system for them where you don’t have to go to the local nursing school or the local undergraduate campus and send out flyers,” Shah told TechCrunch. “That’s what I used to be doing. So we thought should you could make it formal through a technology platform, you may make a huge impact.

Fast forward to 2024, and the platform currently has over 25,000 students from multiple schools including Duke University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, the University of Texas at Austin, and more.

CareYaya conducts background checks on students who want to affix the platform after which conducts video interviews with them. On the user side, people can join the platform after which detail the sort of care their loved one needs. CareYaya then matches students with families, whether for one-time sessions or ongoing care. After the primary session, each parties can submit rankings.

The startup claims it might help families save 1000’s of dollars on recurring elder care. During home care costs average In the US, $35 per hourCareYaya charges between $17 and $20 per hour.

Because student caregivers are tech-savvy, CareYaya equips them with AI-powered technology to acknowledge and track disease progression in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. The company recently launched an LLM (Large Language Model) that integrates with smart glasses to gather visual data to assist students provide higher real-time assistance and conduct early screening for dementia.

As for the long run, CareYaya is trying to expand beyond the US as people in places like Canada, Australia and the UK have shown interest within the platform.