The COVID-19 public health emergency has caused many home care agencies to turn to online training to get around social-distancing barriers. One company that specializes in virtual training for the home care workforce now has added firepower to grow its platform.
CareAcademy publicly announced Thursday that it has raised an additional 9.5 million in Series A, bringing its overall funding total to $13 million since launching in 2016.
Headquartered in Boston, CareAcademy is a training platform for home care professionals. The company currently serves roughly 1,000 home care clients and locations, including Comfort Keepers, Home Care Assistance, Home Helpers, Visiting Angels, CareLinx and Gareda Home Care Services.
Additionally, over 110,000 home care professionals are currently enrolled in CareAcademy courses, according to the company.
CareAcademy’s latest funding round was led by investment company Impact America Fund and venture capital firm Rethink Impact.
“With nearly 400,000 home health care businesses in this $103 billion market, the sky’s the limit on what Care Academy can build in partnership with its growing list of agency customers around the country,” Heidi Patel, managing partner at Rethink Impact, told Home Health Care News in an email.
The new capital will be used to further scale CareAcademy’s business and training programs, Helen Adeosun, the company’s founder and CEO, told HHCN.
“We wanted to meet the challenge that has been presented by COVID-19 — the need for increased capacity and workforce within home care,” Adeosun said. “We have a goal of training 1 million direct care workers by 2023, to meet the needs of the increasingly aging population. … That all starts with the company and the team we are building right now, as well as the scalability of our platform.”
As the COVID-19 emergency continues, tools that can enable providers to train workers in a way that lessons in-person contact will be more important than ever, she noted.
Adeosun declined to comment on CareAcademy’s current revenue figures.
“As we think about what happens next, that brings us to questions around opportunity and employment,” she said. “Right now, we have a number of customers saying that not only do they want people to be skilled around COVID-19 and able to meet those challenges but [new people] entering the workforce.”
Looking ahead at the coming months, CareAcademy has centered courses around training for a variety of subjects, including the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and comorbidities in relation to COVID-19.
“We see the moment that we are in right now as an opportunity to keep building on top of the capacity that direct care workers will be called upon should there be a second wave of the disease in the fall, which I think a lot of people are anticipating at this point,” Adeosun said.
Recently, a training course the company made free and available received more than 80,000 views.
Additionally, CareAcademy’s new funding will be used to expand the company’s technology capabilities and serve more markets.
“We’ll be able to meet the needs of more Medicaid-certified agencies, expand our technology platform’s ability to help agencies better recruit, onboard and retain qualified caregivers, and generate health care-related outcomes for payers,” Adeosun said.
Apart from the funding news, CareAcademy is also moving full-speed ahead on its partnership endeavors. Last year, for example, CareAcademy formed a platform integration partnership with home care software company ClearCare.
“As people are now in the fight of their lives to bring on more direct care workers and onboard rapidly, our integration is specifically tied to helping people do that even faster,” Adeosun said. “We are super excited about what that means in terms of enabling home care to really achieve and be a part of providing great health care outcomes.”
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