CareYaya enables affordable home care by connecting healthcare students and seniors

CareYaya, a platform for people who need caregivers and healthcare students, is working to disrupt the care industry. The startup, showcased as part of Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to develop cost-effective home support, while helping students prepare for their future healthcare careers.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Neal Shah, who came up with the idea of ​​the startup based on his experience as a caregiver for his wife after she was diagnosed with cancer and various other diseases. During this time, Shah was a partner in a hedge fund and had to liquidate his fund to become a full-time caretaker for two years.

To get his wife extra care, Shah hired college students studying health care to be his wife’s caregivers. Shah discovered that other families were doing the same thing informally by posting flyers on local campuses to find a suitable caregiver for their loved one.

“I was like, wouldn’t it be great to just create a formal program for them to do it, where you don’t have to go to your local nursing school or your local undergrad campus and mail flyers,” Shah told TechCrunch. “This is what I was doing. So we were like, if you can bring that to a formal place through a technology platform, you can have a big impact. ”

Flash forward to 2024, and the campus now has over 25,000 students on campus from many schools, including Duke University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, the University of Texas at Austin, and more.

CareYaya conducts background checks on candidates who want to join the platform and completes video-based interviews with them. On the user side, people can join the forum and describe the type of care their loved ones need. CareYaya then matches students with families, whether it’s for a one-time session or ongoing care. After the first session, both parties can leave the ratings.

The startup says it can help families save thousands of dollars on recurring senior care. While home care costs an average of $35 an hour in the US, CareYaya costs between $17 and $20 an hour.

As caregiving students are tech-savvy, CareYaya equips them with AI-powered technology to identify 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 collect visual data to help students provide better real-time assistance and diagnose dementia early.

As for the future, CareYaya wants to explore expanding beyond the United States, as the platform has seen interest from people in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.