Care Sourcer bags £8.5m funding from two investors

A PIONEERING Edinburgh digital start-up has announced funding of £8.5 million. Care Sourcer, the care comparison and matching website, announced that it has raised the £8.5m from two investors, Legal & General Retirement Retail and ADV, and is expanding the team at its Edinburgh headquarters. The investment will help the Scottish tech pioneers expand their care matching technology across the UK and grow the existing team from 20 employees to 100 by the year 2020. Care Sourcer is the first UK comparison and matching site for older people care. It allows customers to receive three offers from care providers who have immediate availability. The service can be used by private individuals, GPs, social workers, or anyone else who needs to find care for an older person. According to Crunchbase, the £8.5m investment represents the largest Series A funding round secured by a Scottish digital tech company. Care Sourcer’s co-founder and CEO Andrew McGinley said: “Right now, too many older people are waiting weeks or even months for care – this causes incredible stress for people and their families, and it’s also a huge expense to our health system, costing NHS Scotland £132 million every year. “People deserve better. The right care is quite often out there, but people struggle to access it quickly and effectively and we know that our technology can help.

“Our team is incredibly motivated to make sure that nobody in the UK has to wait for care when they need it. We’re already helping people here in Edinburgh and in London, and this investment allows us to expand our world-class team to bring our care matching technology to the whole of the UK. “In particular, we need skilled engineers and product specialists who can help make our platform as simple to use as possible.” The company also announced that it has appointed former Skyscanner COO Mark Logan to its board as a non-executive director and advisor. Logan, who was recently named as the first male ambassador to join Women’s Enterprise Scotland, joined Skyscanner in 2012 to take on the general management of the business, culminating in a £1.5 billion acquisition in 2016 by Chinese travel firm Ctrip.

Mr Logan said on the investment: “Care Sourcer is one of the UK’s most exciting start-ups; it has the potential to make a hugely positive impact both on people’s lives and on the entire social care system. This investment enables Care Sourcer to expand its service rapidly, and I’m very excited at the prospect of helping the team to successfully scale the business.” Care Sourcer has raised £9m to date since launch in 2016. In 2017, it won a nationwide Small Business Research Initiative contract worth £100,000 to tackle “bed-blocking” with NHS England.