You were recently selected for Tech Nation’s Future Fifty program – what are your hopes for the future and how does it feel to be recognised as a future unicorn?
We are thrilled to receive this recognition and to follow the lead of others like Starling Bank, Deliveroo and Revolut.
Being part of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty programme gives us a unique opportunity to work with some of the UK’s most promising businesses and we are excited to gain insight and support and share the challenges we share as businesses at a similar stage of growth on topics such as talent, regulation, market trends and investment.
What was the inspiration behind starting Birdie?
Birdie’s mission is to reinvent care through technology, empowering seniors to live longer, happier, and more independent lives.
The impetus for this journey was a personal experience with my grandfather that made us think more about how we care for the elderly at home. We quickly realized that the home healthcare sector had been left behind by the digital revolution and that it needed to be completely rethought to properly serve an ageing society.
My co-founders and I teamed up in 2017 to explore new and better ways to solve this critical problem.
Tell us about your business: what it is, what you aim to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers, etc.
We believe the future of healthcare will be proactive, personalised, put the care recipient at the heart of it and firmly rooted in community. To realise this vision, Birdie aims to build the best technology to help everyone in the care ecosystem – health and social care providers, families and community members – receive the best personalised care support in their own home.
Today we’re focused on a key part of this challenge: the home care sector. Our product is a powerful home care technology platform that supports every part of a care provider’s operation, from care management to rostering, finances, audit and communications. Digitizing these processes will create vital efficiencies in a sector where labour, capital and time are scarce, helping businesses of all sizes thrive.
This efficiency also enables us to provide a higher standard of care: by carefully recording each care recipient’s needs and communicating them to experts, we help ensure they receive the best possible care.
It’s important to Birdie that we don’t stop there once a once paper-based process has been digitised. We believe in the power of data to solve new problems and introduce new ideas. For example, our unique Q-Score automatically captures daily inputs and shows how an organisation is performing against CQC inspection standards – a groundbreaking way of managing quality assurance.
We’re also proud to have had a partner-centric philosophy since our inception – working closely with the care providers and professionals who use Birdie to deliver quality care and ensure our partners thrive.
This approach is well illustrated in how we see our position in the market: we’re here to support a vital industry – and that support doesn’t just stop with our technology. That’s why earlier this year we launched Flock, a community where care professionals can share insights, build relationships, and access content and events. In just a few months Flock has since grown to over 1,200 members, making it the fourth largest care community in the UK.
How has the business evolved since you started and when was that?
We’re incredibly proud of how Birdie has evolved since launching in 2017. We’ve grown 5435% over the last four years, ranking 6th in the 2023 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 and in the top 5% of the fastest growing technology companies in EMEA.
In terms of market share, we currently support the daily care of 60,000 seniors through our partnerships with over 1,000 home care providers. As an all-in-one solution for care providers, we have saved agents a total of 353,090 hours, or 14,712 days, in care planning in 2023. Demand for our services has increased 300% year-over-year, indicating that we are on track for continued success.
Birdie continues to grow, building one of Europe’s largest home healthcare datasets, collecting 1.8 billion data points last year alone. This data provides greater insight for care businesses and paves the way for more personalised and proactive care solutions.
Tell us about Birdie’s work culture.
At Birdie, we’ve built a culture that encourages innovation from the ground up. We aim to be at the forefront of the healthtech revolution, so it’s important that our teams are able to realise these ambitions within a supportive environment.
To achieve this, we put a lot of time and effort into making Birdie a great place to work. We offer a range of benefits including flexible working hours, the flexibility to work from anywhere, parental and fertility leave, etc. We also encourage all our employees to develop an entrepreneurial spirit at Birdie, so we provide each staff member with a personal development budget.
To ensure this meets our team’s needs, we conduct quarterly employee barometer checks and have rigorous processes in place to ensure feedback is heard and acted on across the organisation.
What do you like most about being a founder?
What I love most about being a founder is building. Building real solutions for real problems. Building a team of great people with strong values. Building relationships with investors and other stakeholders. And building a vision for this industry with our partners.
What does the future hold?
Looking ahead to the coming year, Birdie aims to grow and support more home health and care providers within the UK. With a vision to support seniors around the world, the company is also expanding into new markets, having recently launched in Germany. Additionally, the company wants to improve its use of NLP and AI tools to improve the intuitive intelligence of its digital platform.
What is one piece of advice you would give to other founders or future founders?
The biggest advice I would give to other founders, and those considering starting a business, is to stick to your beliefs. As a founder, you need to stay true to your vision and values that will truly bring about change in society. Then you can focus all your energy on execution. If you want to have a positive impact on society, it is important to keep in mind why you are driving this change. You will encounter doubts, headwinds, and conflicting advice. You will walk many different paths, including paths that lead to failure. What matters is to serve and be dedicated to a noble purpose regardless of the outcome.
Finally, a more personal question: What are your daily routines and life rules currently?
I don’t have a particularly strict routine, but the main components are daily exercise, a clear list of goals for the day, time to focus and focus, setting aside Slack/emails and meetings to avoid multitasking, etc. I make a real effort to find relaxing activities in the evenings, whether that be spending time with friends and family or other hobbies.
Max Parmentier is CEO and co-founder of Birdie, an intelligent platform for home care.
Tech Nation’s Future Fifty programme aims to provide access and growth opportunities for later-stage companies and has backed some of the UK’s most prominent unicorns, including Monzo, Darktrace, Revolut, Starling, Skyscanner and Deliveroo.
