Care is a £50 billion-plus business in Britain – and Ben Maruthappu leapt over hundreds of industry incumbents to build his $1 billion unicorn Cera in just nine years.

How? Uniting both care delivery and technology under the same umbrella was a key factor,  the founder says. “So we could transform the entire model of care, rather than just building technology and relying on other providers to make the most of it,” 37-year old Maruthappu explains. “We’ve built technology with frontline staff at the centre – my experience in the NHS taught me that, when staff think technology is just a nice-to-have, they don’t adopt it. To be successful, technology has to solve some of the key pain points frontline staff face daily. We focused on a large, fragmented part of the market, that is analogue and antiquated.

“Looking back, these factors made it more likely we could achieve scale and impact.”

Maruthappu went “from being a doctor with almost no business experience, to launching and building a business pretty much overnight” and concedes: “It was a steep learning curve.” Co-founders provided some commercial nous and helped with a $1.5 million seed round before Cera launched in November 2016.

“We started out as an online marketplace, making it possible for families to organise care online, but realised that to build a truly transformative model we needed to cover the full continuum of care and technology.”

Cera then moved from a marketplace model to becoming a regulated care provider, employing carers and nurses to work in people’s homes, whilst simultaneously hiring data scientists and product engineers to scale.

It’s now raised over $400 million of equity and debt financing in a series of rounds, but in the early days finding clients was low-tech, Maruthappu reports.

“We were extremely persistent. We knocked on doors, fixed meetings with everyone we could, and worked relentlessly to persuade people to take a bet on us. A key moment was during the pandemic. Almost overnight, the UK faced mass unemployment, coupled with a healthcare emergency that overwhelmed the system with COVID patients. We saw an opportunity to both help people who had suddenly lost a job, and bring more staff into the sector to meet surging demand for care, so launched a large-scale initiative to recruit and train people who had lost jobs as carers.”

In 18 months, Cera recruited 10,000 new staff, and the Government licensed its recruitment technology to 2000 other care companies. The firm offered a similar retraining package in 2022, when the cost of living crisis struck, and the firm sought out staff outside of the care sector by offering new clinical responsibilities and the chance for new qualifications via apprenticeship schemes. “Within two years over a million people had applied to work at Cera as a carer or a nurse, half from outside the sector.”

A ‘back to work programme’ has also been successful: around a third of new Cera recruits in the past year were previously unemployed.

Meanwhile, Cera’s revenues have soared, set to hit $500 million this year. Maruthappu said there’s no immediate plans for an exit, though: “Firstly, we will continue to expand geographically, scaling across new areas within the UK and Germany. Secondly, we plan to keep expanding into new service lines in the home” – such as nursing, physiotherapy, complex and specialist care, and even ‘home care robots’ which the founder claimed are “boosting care capacity, tackling isolation by keeping patients connected to care teams and loved ones, and taking the sector into the future.”

Cera is also licensing more of its tech to other healthcare firms. “When I was an A&E doctor, I used to see older patients come in regularly with infections such as urine infections. Usually we managed to treat them, but occasionally patients were sadly brought in too late. You never forget moments like this as a doctor,” Maruthappu adds. “Several years later, when we rolled out our AI Hospitalisation Predict-Prevent tool at Cera, the tool spotted someone with an infection within hours, and that person then got antibiotics, and avoided hospitalisation completely. What was once an aspirational idea had become reality.”

Read more about Cera via their website and read more of our scaleup stories here.

Ben Maruthappu founder of Cera