BelleVie raises £2.1 million in seed funding and grants to boost award-winning care model across the UK
We are proud to announce that we have received £2.1 million in our latest seed and grant funding round from a group of ambitious, purpose-led investors who share our mission to empower more people to thrive at home.
The £1.6 million seed funding round, led by Skagen Conscience Capital, will enable our Wellbeing Support Teams to scale up the high-quality, award-winning care across Northumberland and Oxfordshire and beyond (more on that soon!).
Also providing their backing to this seed round are north east-focused investment fund Northstar Ventures, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Treebeard Trust.
This investment has also unlocked a further £550,000 in grant funding from UK Research and Innovation’s Healthy Ageing Challenge, which is delivered by Innovate UK, the government body supporting business-led innovation across sectors and regions. This brings the total received this funding round to £2.15 million, and the total the company has raised so far to £3.4 million.
Commenting on the latest funding round, our co-founder and CEO Trudie Fell said:
“We’re thrilled to have the backing of this great group of investors; their belief in us is great validation of our model. Together, we can address society’s most pressing challenges.”
“This latest investment round means we can accelerate our mission to reinvent the future of care work. It’s only when those providing support feel valued and thrive, can the people who they support also feel valued and thrive.”
How do we work?
Our services, which are rated ‘Good’ by the Care Quality Commission, support older people to thrive at home by deploying innovative ways of working inspired by the successful Dutch ‘Buurtzorg’ model. This centres around an approach pioneered in the Netherlands, which sees 10-person self-managing teams serve their local community, providing continuity of care and building trusted relationships. This model gives Wellbeing Support Workers more time to provide meaningful care and support to their clients. Our care operations, which are funded via a unique monthly subscription model, are rated 9.6/10 by independently verified reviews website homecare.co.uk and have a Net Promoter Score of 95%.
It’s clear that the current, low value ‘time-and-task’ model of providing care via underpaid, undervalued contract workers is failing the very people it is supposed to support.
Our founders, Trudie Fell and Violaine Pierre, were inspired to create a new type of homecare provider to address the large, growing and crucially, unmet demand for quality care across the UK, underpinned by new ways of working and intelligent digital tools to manage demand, schedule care and provide those receiving care with a wide range of products and services via a unique ‘Wellbeing Operating System’.
This cloud-based platform allows carers to spend more time caring, and enables BelleVie to scale – allowing us to support more people in the place most of us would prefer to grow old in, our own homes. It is the first English-language technical platform created for self-managing care teams.
Valued staff at the heart of our care model
The vast majority of our team members are paid employees, rather than zero-hours contractors, and we are proud to be an accredited Living Wage Employer. We recruit people based on their values, rather than their previous experience.
With the majority of our employees coming from a non-care background, our excellent onboarding and training, and a 66% employee Net Promoter Score (NPS), we are proving that we can solve the recruitment and retention problems at the heart of the care crisis.
Teams flex as the needs of those they support change, using bespoke rostering tools to rapidly adapt. The unique insights gained by our teams on the ground are enabling us to build a managed marketplace of third-party products and services, providing whatever people need to live their best lives at home.
Future roadmap
At the heart of our mission to support as many people as possible to thrive at home. Our roadmap into 2024 to scale our care networks and further improve the technology that powers its services. These include intelligent rotas, colleague development and client wellbeing tools and the development of a ‘Thriving at home’ marketplace of third-party products and services.
Hear from the people that we support!
What do our investors say?
Jack Goldstein, Investment Director of Skagen Conscience Capital, said:
“We are incredibly proud to empower BelleVie Care in their goal to support older people to thrive at home. The way adult home care is currently delivered in the UK requires fixing, and BelleVie’s multi-award winning operating model and technology platform will do just that.”
Alasdair Greig, Director at Northstar Ventures, said:
“We are thrilled to be supporting a company that has such a novel and disruptive approach to solving the care crisis, one of our most intractable societal challenges. The BelleVie model drives dramatic improvement in the lives of both care workers and the people they support, and we look forward to seeing it scaled rapidly across the UK.”
Denise Holle, Head of Social Investment at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said:
“Through its social investment in BelleVie, Joseph Rowntree Foundation is furthering its mission to inspire social change and address the root causes of poverty and economic insecurity.
“BelleVie is reinventing the delivery and business model for home care in the UK. It has put carers and clients at the heart of its model and is using technology to enable, rather than replace, more and better human interactions. BelleVie is also an accredited Living Wage Employer, and this is another important aspect of its operating model which JRF is delighted to be supporting.”
Helen Crampin, Innovation and Technology Lead, UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge said:
“We’re pleased to support this innovative model in the care sector, from our Innovate UK funding partnership with Northstar Ventures.
“We aim to work with partners to support businesses that are focused on helping people to remain active, productive, independent and socially connected across the generations. Developing new models of care that lead to benefits for both carers and older people is an important issue for the future.”
Find out more about what we do here and how we can support you or a loved one to live well at home.
