citybiz+ Elder Care Platform Sage Closes $15 Million Series A Led by Maveron

Sage, which has built a tech platform to enhance care for older adults, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by new investor Maveron, whose principals work out of New York, San Francisco and Seattle, Wash.

Prior investors Goldcrest Capital (Dallas, Texas), ANIMO Ventures (Miami, Fla.), and Distributed Ventures (New York) also participated. In 2022, Sage raised $9 million in a seed round.

Maveron Partner to Join Board

Subsequent to the Series A round, Maveron partner Natalie Dillon will become the Sage board’s first outside director, the company said.

“Sage is a game-changer for senior living communities. By offering a modern care coordination platform, care teams are able to provide more timely and more confident care to their residents,” Dillon, who started her career as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, said on LinkedIn.

Communities enabled with Sage have seen caregivers’ response times improve by 50%, and complaints from family and friends have fallen 90%, she added.

“Our mission at Sage is to improve the care and quality of life for caregivers and older adults,” said co-founder and CEO Raj Mehra, who earned an MS in Healthcare Policy & Research at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.

Keeping Faith in Tech

Sage has used modern technology to replace legacy devices used in healthcare, ranging from a more responsive help button to a real-time alert system. Its devices enable communication and collaboration among caregivers and residents. The company says its data platform generates insights to enable care teams identify health anomalies and make better decisions for residents, while driving more efficient operations and transparency for families.

“Senior living communities across the country have embraced our platform because it provides clear improvements to older adults’ care experience,” said Mehra, who previously worked at healthcare fintech Cedar and data analytics firm Palantir. Mehra’s co-founder Matt Lynch, who serves as Sage’s chief technology officer, also worked at Palantir.

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Sage says its technology can also help ease imminent labor shortage predicted in a 2021 survey by the American Health Care Association and National Center for Assisted Living. Nearly every nursing home and assisted living facility is expected to face staffing shortage, according to the survey. Already, nearly 60% of nursing homes and nearly a third of assisted living providers are experiencing a “high level” of staffing shortages.

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“As the labor shortage among caregivers accelerates and the U.S. population continues to skew older, the technology Sage provides helps to alleviate some of the most serious challenges in U.S. healthcare today,” said Dillon.

New York-based Distributed Ventures, which has invested in Sage from the seed stage, operates out of a $100 million fund that closed in July. Its recent portfolio investments include Vivante Health, Presta, Wingspan, Tuned and Posterity Health.