❓ Problem

There is a professional whose entire job is running an ageing parent's life. They are called geriatric care managers, they charge $100 to $200 per hour and are almost always private pay, and consequently almost nobody has one.

So the job defaults to whichever adult child lives closest, answers the phone fastest, or is simply worst at saying no. 63 million Americans are now doing this unpaid, nearly 1 in 4 adults and a 45% jump in a decade. They put in 49.5 billion hours in 2024, work worth roughly $1 trillion, which is more than private US businesses spent on health care that year. Nearly 1 in 4 caregivers is doing 40+ hours a week and 29% are simultaneously raising children.

Here is the bit that matters for building a product. A large slice of that work is not caregiving in any physical sense. It is booking the cardiology follow-up, chasing the pharmacy, reading the discharge summary nobody explained, arguing with an insurer, finding a driver for Thursday, and refereeing a WhatsApp group of three siblings with strong opinions and no calendar availability. It is a coordination problem wearing a medical costume, which is exactly why Hera's founder describes watching "the alpha daughter" of her family break down managing her grandmother's dementia care.

The scale of the paperwork alone is absurd. Medicare Advantage insurers issued nearly 53 million prior authorisation determinations in 2024. Only 11.7% of denials get appealed. Of the ones that do, 80.7% are overturned. Families are losing care they are entitled to purely because nobody has the two spare hours and the stamina to write the letter.

Every existing product solves one slice. Pill dispensers do reminders. Medical alerts do falls. Family apps do a shared to-do list nobody updates. None of them do the actual admin, because until very recently software could not pick up a phone, sit on hold, and get a result.

✅ Solution

A shared AI care manager for an ageing parent. One care plan, every sibling on it, and the parent interacting through the phone they already know how to use.

• The parent gets a daily call. A warm five-minute conversation at a set time, with a medication nudge folded into it. No new device, no app, no learning curve. It rings the landline or the mobile and it sounds like a person.
• The family forwards the paperwork. Discharge summaries, insurance letters, lab results, bills. The agent reads them, extracts what actually needs doing, and turns each item into a task on a shared plan.
• It does the admin, with approval. Books the appointment, chases the refill, drafts the appeal citing the right coverage guideline, arranges the transport. High-stakes actions queue for a one-tap sibling approval so no agent is unilaterally rearranging anyone's mother's life.
• It builds the living record. Over months it accumulates the routines, the medication history, the specialist names, the things that worry her. If conversations or routines change noticeably, it flags it to the family as something worth a check-in. It does not diagnose, it does not speculate, and it never pretends to be a doctor.

The wedge is deliberately small and deliberately sentimental: a daily call for Mum. The business underneath is the admin layer that replaces a $150 an hour professional nobody could afford.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• 59 million Americans currently care for an adult. Roughly 83% of all help older Americans receive comes from family, friends or other unpaid caregivers, so this is not a niche, it is the default care system.
• The 65+ population goes from 62.7 million in 2025 to 71.6 million by 2030, one in five Americans. 11,400 people a day are hitting 65 through 2027.
• TAM: take the roughly 25 million US households where an adult child is coordinating care for a parent still living at home. At $588 a year ($49/mo) that is a ~$15bn consumer market, before you touch employers or health plans.