All over the world, public health care systems have struggled to reset post-pandemic, and in particular, the aging population of Western countries is putting pressure on services, not least in the UK where ‘NHS in crisis’ is a regular headline in the media. . As a result, private companies, many with technology, see a gap in the market. Against this background, Cera, a proprietary software platform and home healthcare provider in the UK, has raised $150 million in a mix of debt and equity. The company said the majority of this debt, but refused to give a split and also demurred on the value. The round was led by funds affiliated with BDT & MSD Partners and Schroders Capital to scale the Cera platform. The company says it’s heavily AI-driven, with a proprietary model based on its own data, though it admits to using soma aspects of Google’s Gemini AI platform as well as Microsoft’s version of ChatGPT. In 2022, Cera raised $320 million (£260 million) in an equity and debt financing round, split roughly 50/50. According to CrunchBase it has 14 investors. Notable equity investors to date include Earlymarket, Guinness Ventures, DigitalHealth. London Accelerator, and long-time UK investor Robin Klein. The Cera spokesperson added that, although this has not yet been seen in the publicly filed accounts, the company will be EBITA positive in 2023 and free cash flow positive in 2024, and “increasingly become an independent business,” therefore able to raise this round of debt. In an interview with TechCrunch, Dr. Ben Maruthappu MBE, Founder & CEO of Cera, said: “We are profitable, and we have a very important profit in terms of using technology and AI, and we have developed other services. in house.” Cera nurses use the app to plan their work and record patient symptoms. Using AI modeling, Cera can then take that unstructured data (eg “patient falls at night” etc.) and use it to predict the patient’s potential risk of illness or injury. The company says it has reduced hospitalizations by 70%, reduced patient falls by 20%, and discharged patients up to five times faster, the company said in a statement $407 million so far in a mix of equity and debt. Competitors in the UK include Home Instead and Bluebird Care, which use non-proprietary apps to target staff. In the US, the closest comparisons to Cera include Signify Health and CVS Health, both acquired by the Nasdaq-listed CVS Health. Another is Honor, which has raised $625 million so far. Maruthappu said: “We are taking pressure on the NHS and supporting it to take care of more patients. We have also expanded other services such as nursing services, physiotherapy, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, and providing mental health services at home as well. So, we are a more complete healthcare provider at home. He also said that the AI-driven aspect of the business is based on the data collected: “Another main advantage is what we are doing with technology, more specifically AI… We are recording information about patients from these visits in our application. which now gives us as one of the largest home health care datasets in the world, certainly the largest in Europe, and we have been able to analyze these datasets in various ways to build an algorithm, an algorithm that relates that Someone who wants to have falls before they do.” “We can predict more than 80% of falls a week before they happen. That’s statistically significant… So we’ve actually reduced it by more than 20% because of the AI algorithm… We can also predict about 83% more hospitalizations a week before they happen… reducing hospitalizations by 70%,” he said. In a statement, Rob Platek, partner and global head of credit at BDT & MSD, said: “Cera has achieved strong growth through its demonstrated ability to use technology to deliver exceptional care. usual. We believe Cera is well positioned to grow our business. Cera said it was the UK’s largest non-NHS healthcare provider, covering around 30 million people with 10,000 nurses and nurses and working with more than 150 local authorities and two-thirds of the NHS Integrated Care System. It also claims independent analysis carried out by the UK’s Faculty of Consultancy found Cera’s AI-led home healthcare model is saving the UK healthcare system £1 million a day. Cera is obviously keen to tarnish health startups such as Babylon Health, admittedly a very different business, which went bankrupt and was sold for parts after trying to do health through chatbot only.