90 million people in Europe are older than 65. The older the population, the bigger the strain on the care system. By 2030, Germany might be short half a million nurses, and already today, 4 million elderly Germans require care. Inpatient care homes can’t be built and staffed fast enough. Because of this, many families choose to hire caregivers to live with and take care of the elderly in their own homes. These caregivers are often recruited in Eastern Europe, with around 600’000 of them currently working in Germany. Hence, it is oftentimes also referred to as the third pillar of elderly care, alongside professional nurses and inpatient care facilities. The bad thing about this is that middlemen, agencies that recruit these helping hands, take almost half of the EUR 2600 a family typically pays for a caregiver.

marta has built a matching platform that addresses this increasingly dire supply problem in the care sector and offers a better experience for everyone involved. Thanks to a large pool of thousands of families and caregivers, there is more choice for both sides, and a better fit, with fewer disappointments. Furthermore, marta ensures that caregivers are properly vetted, insured, and paid. With marta, families pay 10% less than the market average, while caregivers earn 35% more, increasing income equality across the continent.

What was the motivation behind starting marta?
My co-founder Philipp and I studied together and have been friends since then. When I was working in the US, we exchanged ideas over the phone and realized that our families were both in the same situation, as our grandfathers needed live-in care. In both cases, there was a very high degree of frustration with the way agencies provided caregivers. In Philipp’s case, the turnover was catastrophic, they had more than 30 different caregivers in a few years. The agencies, which are basically lead vendors, suggested every single time that the next caregiver would be the perfect match. We talked to the caregivers, started to examine the topic more closely, and realized how much better live-in care could be organized. Because live-in care, when done right, can provide so much value for families. It’s human to feel emotionally obliged to care for elderly people in your family, even though you’re busy working all the time. My grandfather was always like a mentor to me and I felt sad to see him suffer because his care wasn’t well organized.

What makes you think that marta is uniquely positioned to solve this problem better than pen-and-paper agencies?
marta is the first digital platform tackling this problem, and unlike agencies provides much-needed transparency for both sides. It allows families seeking care and caregivers to compare different offers and to find a suitable partner much faster.

Can you back up this statement with numbers?
Yes, and the numbers are hair-raising. Today, the misplacement rate of agencies stands at about 80%. The system clearly doesn’t work at all. You must imagine a caregiver with a cat allergy traveling 30 hours by bus just to realize that the family owns a cat. Or a caregiver that measures 1.60m and cannot lift a 100kg man that is immobile. Such pairings are incredibly frustrating for a caregiver who will spend 30 hours on a bus to get home, and for the family that needs to find someone else. It makes no sense. marta takes 130 data points into account to facilitate well-matching pairings. This is the core of our technology, and it’s clear that traditional agencies will never be able to handle this amount of data. The result is that our misplacement rate is a single-digit percentage. Our advantage over traditional agencies is enormous.

Let’s come back to your motivation for starting marta. You identified a problem, but why did you and Philipp think you’re uniquely qualified to solve this problem with a tech startup?
We both like to build things. When I was in school and uni, I started and led an event company and I’m happy to say that I know quite a few couples that met during one of our events. In the case of marta, we realized how immensely large and relevant this problem is, and that with scalable technology, we could help a very large number of people. That is a goal worth pursuing. We also both have experience working in tech companies, working with tech teams, and making tech investments, so we know the playing field from different angles.

About the people marta tries to help: Who is the typical patient?
Our patients are, on average, 81 years old, need assistance in their daily lives and have a free room where the caregiver can live. In Germany, there are 5 degrees of care, ranging from 1 which means slightly impairment of independence to the strongest impairment, corresponding to 5. We typically have patients from degree 2 onwards. This means that they have some sort of immobility and need help in their daily lives with tasks such as shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning and personal hygiene. It goes as far as giving them subcutaneous injections, for example, if they have diabetes. Or giving them medication according to an established plan.

And the typical caregiver?
It is important to note that marta provides live-in caregivers, not medical nurses. More than 90% are women, typically around 45 years old, mothers that have raised children and now seek to improve the financial situation of their families. Many of them do not have formal education, but there are various care courses that provide appropriate training. We only admit caregivers with at least 2 years of experience to offer their services on the platform to families. Many families would appreciate a person that is fluent in German, but this isn’t very common, and in many cases also not needed. It certainly increases the price a caregiver can demand. Many caregivers learn basic German after one or two missions.

What is the legal framework of live-in care?
It is, unlike medical care, unregulated but there are still many complex legal issues. As I mentioned, giving medication, for example, is a task that can be delegated to a caregiver, while establishing a medication plan obviously is not. Furthermore, there are many data protection issues that need to be properly managed. We do have a lot of data points, but on a digital platform, we need to follow the principle of data minimization, which means only displaying the data that is relevant at a certain point but not more. These are very sensitive issues, which is why we worked very closely with the law firm CMS Hasche Sigle and we’re happy that marta is the first venture investment that this law firm ever did.

In terms of investment, marta just announced its Seed financing round of EUR 6.6 million led by Capnamic which was joined by Verve Ventures and also US-based Almaz Capital. Not every European startup manages to attract a US VC in its Seed round.
It was our goal from the start and we’re very happy to have Almaz on board. Aniruddha Nazaré, the partner who led the investment brings a lot of relevant experience to the table. We’re already active in four countries – Germany, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, but we want to internationalize and the US is an obvious choice.

The live-in care market in Germany alone is enormous, there are several hundred thousand caregivers present. You could grow marta to a 100 million revenue company by capturing only a few percent of the market share in Germany. Why undertake a risky expansion to other countries?
This isn’t planned for tomorrow. At the moment, we are concentrating on improving our product and learning and growing step by step. But ultimately, when you want to build an international company, you have to think international from the start, otherwise, you get trapped in a culturally narrow mindset and infrastructure. When we launched in Poland, the process took us just a few weeks, mainly to translate datasets. Now what we offer, improved access to live-in care, isn’t just relevant for Germany or other Western European countries. It is and will become an existential problem in many aging countries, in the US or in Asia. Elderly care is too important a problem not to be solved. There is no technologically leading company in elderly care, and we have the ambition to become one.

To grow, you need to reach two audiences, families and caregivers. How different are the marketing approaches for them?
They are quite different. Families will use search engines, that’s where we want to be present. But there are also offline channels. Hospitals, for example, have a keen interest in improved discharge management, and that’s where we can help them. We already have a referral rate of 30%, which means that these people come to us without any marketing spend. On the side of the caregivers, they mainly use Facebook and many of them are organized in groups on Facebook to exchange their experiences. marta is a young company, but what is essential for us in order to build a brand is that people trust us.