Sensor startup Butlr has raised $38 million to alleviate the workforce crisis in the seniors sector

TThe American Healthcare Association conducted a survey of more than 400 nursing homes in the United States earlier this year: 99% of them reported having open positions, and 94% said it was due to problems recruiting new staff. More than half are concerned about having to close their branches if workforce issues continue.

Meet Butlr: a San Francisco-based startup that creates people-detecting sensors to anonymously measure space and movement in buildings. Today, the company announced it has raised $38 million in a Series B round to expand its presence in senior living communities across the United States, hoping to combat massive labor shortages by using its sensors to monitor health and monitor people’s well-being. live in those communities.

Butlr’s latest round, co-founded by Under 30 alumni Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng in 2019, was led by venture capital firm Foundry, bringing its total funding to $68 million. Pacific Alliance Ventures, Ray Strata and Draper Nexus also participated in the raise. Neither party wants to reveal Butlr’s new valuation.

Deng, 29, and Zeng, 28, first met when they were put on a team for an MIT Hackathon. They say they bonded because they were night owls, so much so that they eventually decided to start a company together (Zeng generously credits Deng for the idea). They started testing their technology in places like Airbnbs, using sensors to control lighting, for example. Eventually they moved to larger use cases in larger real estate, leading to the launch of Butlr.

Since then, the company has been looking for companies with a huge real estate footprint as its main customer base. And it’s worked: the company counts companies like Walmart as customers. The multi-retail conglomerate with offices from New Jersey to Shenzhen, China, uses Butlr’s sensors at more than 30 of its U.S. locations to track data on how many people visit the offices under its hybrid workplace model. This allows it to expand or reduce its office space depending on its needs.

“Buildings are the largest man-made product and a major contributor to energy production. In everyday life, there is simply no insight into how many people are using the space,” says Deng, CEO of Butlr. “The closest thing is CCTV, and no one wants cameras flying around.”

A big selling point, the co-founders say, is that the identity of whoever is in the office remains anonymous. The wireless sensors that connect via WiFi, Ethernet or mobile data pick up thermal heat, so what you see in the associated software can best be described as flashing dots moving around.

Walmart, Uber and Netflix are just some of the customers paying for Butlr’s product on an annual subscription basis, which costs a few hundred dollars per year for each sensor. Although the startup has more than 150 enterprise customers and says signed contracts are in the eight figures — statistics that convinced Foundry to invest in the startup for the first time — the VC firm said Forbes that the latest round of capital is focused on what the co-founder described as a larger goal: senior living communities.

“Butlr could build a very large company just by focusing on business,” said Seth Levine, partner and co-founder of Foundry. “But it’s nice to do something that you think is really good for the world.”

Butlr made its first use of seniors’ homes in early 2022, but it’s not the first or only remote monitoring technology to exist there $90 billion market. Adam Kaplan, who manages and acquires real estate as founder of Solera Senior Living, said the industry is hungry for technology that can solve pain points like labor shortages without straining often very tight budgets.

Deng said his company’s software offers an advantage in this regard because it can be integrated with a field nurse call system and can alert staff of falls, monitor how many times a resident has gotten out of bed, locate and keep track of wanderers who is awake and who is asleep. , For example. And the privacy of residents is not affected by camera images.

“Many competitor products are based on cameras, but those cameras could never be installed in some areas, such as bathrooms,” said Zeng, Chief Product Officer. “When it comes to things like fall detection, we don’t need to know who has fallen. Every fall into space is an emergency.”

Kaplan agrees that technology like Butlr’s can have real value: Tracking a bad night’s sleep could indicate breathing problems, or if a resident goes to the bathroom more often than usual, it could imply a urinary tract infection. Avoiding the use of cameras is a bonus, he said, because it protects privacy and the sensors can be used in places cameras wouldn’t normally go. Above all, passively monitoring which residents need attention could help with the relationship between caregivers and clients.

So far, Butlr is being used in 12 senior living communities, including the Shell Point Retirement Home, which has about 700 residents. The startup is currently conducting studies with researchers from the University of Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School on how the software can be used to improve care for seniors, with fewer caregivers. The results of this are expected to be released later this year.

In the meantime, Butlr also released a chatbot in OpenAI’s GPT store earlier this year that allows senior home operators to ask more detailed questions about the patterns in their data. With new investments in hand, Deng and Zeng say their company’s goal is to double their market presence by the end of 2024.

In addition, the company also plans to make its products available directly to consumers for a variety of applications, such as helping monitor the health of seniors living at home or providing home security without cameras.

“What the market has taught us is to just look away from the hype and focus on one thing,” Deng said. “Having become the leader in aged care, I am confident we can reach every household. That is the impact we want to make.”