The American Healthcare Association conducted a survey of more than 400 nursing homes across the United States earlier this year: 99% of them reported having open job positions, and 94% said it was due to difficulty recruiting new staff. More than half are concerned about having to shut their facilities if the workforce challenges persist.
Enter Butlr: a San Francisco-based startup that makes people-detecting sensors to anonymously measure space and movement inside buildings. Today, the company announced it raised $38 million in a Series B round to expand its presence in senior living communities across the United States, with the hopes of countering the massive labor shortages by using its sensors to track the health and well-being of people living in those communities.
Cofounded by Under 30 alums Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng in 2019, Butlr’s latest round was led by VC firm Foundry, bringing its total funding to $68 million. The raise also saw participation from Pacific Alliance Ventures, Ray Strata and Draper Nexus. Neither party would disclose 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 over being nightowls, so much so that they eventually decided to found a company together (Zeng generously gives credit to Deng for the idea). They started off testing their tech in places like Airbnbs, using sensors to do things like control lights. They eventually moved on to bigger use cases in larger real estate, which led to the launch of Butlr.
Since then, the company has been going after companies with massive real estate footprints as their main clientele. And it’s worked: the company counts corporations like Walmart as customers. The retail multi-conglomerate that has offices spanning from New Jersey to Shenzhen, China is using Butlr’s sensors in more than 30 of its U.S. locations to track data on how many people are frequenting the offices under its hybrid workplace model. This enables it to either expand or reduce its office space depending on the need.
“Buildings are the biggest man-made product and a huge cause of energy output. In the day-to-day, there’s just no intelligence of how many people are using the space,” said Deng, Butlr’s CEO. “The closest thing is CCTV, and nobody wants cameras flying around.”
A big selling point, the cofounders say, is the identities of who is in the office remain anonymous. The wireless sensors that connect via WiFi, Ethernet or cellular data pick up on thermal heat, so what you see on a companion software might be best described as flashing dots moving about.
Walmart, Uber and Netflix are just some of the clients that pay for Butlr’s product on an annual subscription basis, which is priced at a couple hundred dollars a year for each sensor. Although the startup counts more than 150 corporate customers and says signed contracts amount to eight figures—stats that convinced Foundry to invest in the startup for the first time—the VC firm told Forbes that its latest round of capital is aimed towards what its cofounder described as a greater cause: senior living communities.
“Butlr could build a really big business just by focusing on corporate,” said Seth Levine, partner and cofounder at Foundry. “But it’s nice to do something you think is actually good for the world.”
Butlr first tapped into senior homes in early 2022, but it isn’t the first or only remote monitoring tech to exist in this $90 billion market. Adam Kaplan, who manages and acquires properties as founder of Solera Senior Living, said the industry is hungry for technology that can solve pain points like the labor shortage without taxing what are often very tight budgets.
Deng said his company’s software offers an advantage in this regard, because it can integrate with a field nurse calling system and alert staff of falls, monitor how many times a resident got out of bed, locate wanderers and keep track of who’s awake and who’s asleep, for example. And residents don’t have their privacy compromised by being on camera.
“A lot of competitors’ products are camera-based, but those cameras could never be installed in some areas like bathrooms,” said Zeng, who’s chief product officer. “When it comes to things like fall detection, we don’t need to know who fell. Any fall in the space is an emergency.”
Kaplan agrees tech like Butlr’s can have real value: Tracking a poor night’s sleep might signal respiratory issues, or a resident frequenting the bathroom more times than usual 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 normally wouldn’t be. Most of all, being able to passively monitor which residents need attention might help with the caregiver-to-resident ratios.
So far, Butlr is used in 12 senior living communities, including Shell Point Retirement Home where some 700 residents live. The startup is currently conducting studies with researchers from University of Massachusetts and Harvard Medical School on how its software can be used to better care for seniors, with fewer caregivers, results of which are expected to be released later this year.
In the meantime, Butlr also released a chatbot on OpenAI’s GPT store earlier this year that enables senior home operators to ask more detailed questions about the patterns in their data. With fresh investment in hand, Deng and Zeng say their company’s goal is to double their presence in the market by the end of 2024.
Beyond that, the company also plans to make its products available directly to consumers for a variety of applications, such as to help monitor the health of seniors still living at home or to provide home security without cameras.
“What the market taught us is to just look away from the hype and focus on one thing,” Deng said. “After we become the leader in the senior care community, I firmly believe we will be able to get into every single household. That’s the impact we want to make.”
