The American Health Care Association surveyed more than 400 nursing homes in the United States earlier this year: 99% of them said they had open positions and 94% said it was due to difficulties recruiting new staff. More than partly, they worry that they will have to close their amenities if work disorders persist.
Enter Butlr: a San Francisco-based startup that makes people-detection sensors to anonymously measure the area and movement inside buildings. Today, the company announced that it has raised $38 million in a Series B circular to expand its presence in senior communities across the United States. United States, hoping to counter the severe shortage of hard work through its sensors to track the fitness and well-being of others living in those communities.
Co-founded through under-30 alumni Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng in 2019, Butlr’s most recent investment circular was led by venture capital company Foundry, bringing its total investment to $68 million. The construction also included the participation of Pacific Alliance Ventures. Draper Nexus and Ray Stata. Neither party sought to reveal Butlr’s new valuation.
Deng, 29, and Zeng, 28, met when they were put on a team for an MIT hackathon. They say they became friends while they were night owls, to the point that they eventually decided to found a company together (Zeng generously credits Deng for this idea). They began testing their generation in places like Airbnb, using sensors for lighting, for example. They eventually moved on to larger instances of use in larger real estate, leading to the launch of Butlr.
Since then, the company has primarily served companies with a large real estate footprint. And it worked: The company’s customers come from companies like Walmart. The retail multi-conglomerate with offices stretching from New Jersey to Shenzhen, China, uses Butlr sensors at more than 30 of its locations in the United States to track data on the number of people who frequent the offices as part of its hybrid workplace model. This allows you to expand or shrink your workspace as needed.
“Buildings are the largest man-made product and a huge source of energy production. Day to day, we simply don’t have data on how many other people occupy the space,” said Deng, CEO of Butlr. The closest thing to that is video surveillance, and no one needs cameras to fly. “
Butlr’s software allows consumers to access a database that shows occupancy by floor.
According to the co-founders, one of the main problems with advertising is that people’s identities in the workplace remain anonymous. Wireless sensors that connect WiFi, Ethernet, or mobile data capture thermal heat, so what you see in other important applications might be more productively described as moving flickering dots.
Walmart, Uber and Netflix are just a few of the consumers who pay for Butlr’s product through an annual subscription, which costs a few hundred dollars a year for each sensor. Although the startup has more than 150 business clients and claims that signed contracts amount to 8 figures (statistics that convinced Foundry to invest in the startup for the first time), the venture capital firm told Forbes that its latest fundraise was aimed at what its co-founder described. as a broader cause: senior housing communities.
“Butlr can build a giant company just by focusing on business,” said Seth Levine, spouse and co-founder of Foundry. “But it’s great to do anything you think is smart for the world. “
Butlr first tapped into the senior housing sector in early 2022, but it’s not the first or only generation of remote monitoring to exist in this $90 billion market. Adam Kaplan, who manages and acquires homes as founder of Solera Senior Living, said the industry is hungry for a generation that can solve disruptions like the labor shortage without taxing tight budgets.
Deng said his company’s software has merit in this regard because it can integrate with a nurse call and fall alert formula, monitor how many times a resident has gotten out of bed, locate bums and track who is awake. and who sleeps Matrix For example. And citizens do not see their privacy compromised by being filmed.
“Many competing products are based on cameras, but those cameras may never be installed in certain regions, such as bathrooms,” said Zeng, product manager. “When it comes to things like fall detection, we don’t want to know who fell. Any fall in the area is an emergency.
Kaplan, that generation like Butlr’s may have genuine value: Tracking a night of poor sleep may indicate breathing problems, or a resident using the bathroom more times than usual may simply be implying a urinary tract infection. Avoiding the use of cameras is a benefit, he said, because it protects privacy and the sensors can be used in places where cameras wouldn’t be before. Importantly, being able to passively monitor which citizens want care can help reduce the ratio of caregivers to residents.
So far, Butlr is used in 12 nursing homes, in addition to Shell Point Retirement Home, where about 700 citizens live. Lately, the startup is conducting studies with researchers at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School on how its software can be used to achieve greater benefits. care for older adults, with fewer caregivers, the effects of which are expected to be noticeable at the end of this year.
Meanwhile, Butlr also launched a chatbot on OpenAI’s GPT store earlier this year, in which senior traders can ask more detailed questions about patterns in their data. Through new investments, Deng and Zeng say their company’s purpose is to double its market presence to the end. of 2024.
Beyond that, the company also plans to make its products available directly to consumers for applications, such as helping monitor the fitness of seniors still living at home or keeping the home safe without cameras.
“What the market has taught us is to simply look away from the hype and focus on one thing,” Deng said. “Once we become leaders in aged care, I firmly believe that we will be able to penetrate each and every home. That is the effect we need to have.