Montreal’s AlayaCare is raising $33 million in primary venture capital to put towards its home healthcare technology. Coupled with $18 million in secondary money, the series B round is worth $51 million in total.

The funding is coming from Inovia Capital, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and Investissement Québec.

CEO Adrian Schauer told MTLinTECH that the $100 million dollar home care software market in Canada is ripe for change, and Alaya Care is taking advantage.

“We made some bets on how the home care market was going to shift and those are turning out to be true, and so we’ve got a good lead on our competitors. It’s a space where there’s a lot of old, incumbent software and there aren’t a ton of hot new players,” said Schauer.

However, “home care is evolving at a frenetic pace, and the market is clearly shifting to a technology-enabled delivery model,” he said.

AlayaCare’s platform helps home and community care agencies manage all aspects of their business and operations using a single cloud-based SaaS platform. This can improve the patient experience, improve the caregiver experience and lower costs for organizations by streamlining billing and communications. The platform includes back office, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, telehealth, and mobile care worker functionality.

The cost of delivering follow-up care after a hospital visit is far lower than keeping patients in the hospital. However, the tools used to manage this type of care hasn’t evolved with the times.

AlayaCare will target Canada, the US and Australia. They’ll use the new funding to invest in those markets, invest in the product and even acquire other companies. They’ll also hire more folks in Montreal, which houses about 115 of its 200 employees.

AlayaCare is Schauer’s third startup, after having previously sold his first two startups. Both of those were also in the home care space. AlayaCare’s first few investment rounds were cheques that Schauer wrote himself. In late 2016 the company raised an angel round of funding and, in 2018, the company did a series B round worth $13.8 million, led by iNovia. To date, AlayaCare has raised just over $50 million in venture funding.

For Schauer, the home health care market was underserved in quality software. Before he came to that conclusion, a few significant events in his career path happened.

Schauer’s previous startup was a mobile workforce management platform, later acquired by Red Prairie (JDA). Before that he sold Vortex Mobile, a mobile marketing company, to Transcontinental.

“We weren’t able to really follow the ambition there but I had seen enough of the home healthcare market to know that there was a mobile workforce management opportunity,” said the CEO. “In parallel I invested in a point-of-care medical device company back in 2013 and that opened my eyes to all the things that happen at the hospital today which will happen at the home bedside tomorrow.”

Enter AlayaCare in 2014. The Montreal-based company now has over 200 employees and has offices in both Toronto and Melbourne, Australia.

“He’s like this guy who you meet and you want to be his friend right away. He’s the type of entrepreneur that we’re extremely comfortable doubling up on.”

iNovia Capital’s Chris Arsenault compared the aim of AlayaCare’s vision to that of Montreal tech success Lightspeed. All the complexity is managed in the backend while the frontend service is simple and elegant.

But Arsenault went further in his analysis of his new investment, telling MTLinTECH that this bet was made largely on the CEO Schauer.

“Adrian is an amazing entrepreneur,” said Arsenault. “We got to know him two years before we invested in his company for the first time and he continues to up the bar. He’s like this guy who you meet and you want to be his friend right away. He’s the type of entrepreneur that we’re extremely comfortable doubling up on.”

“Investing in entrepreneurs is a very subjective experience,” continued Arsenault. “You want the entrepreneurs with the leadership, vision and the grit to get it done no matter what but at the same time to be able to listen and decide if they need to change their direction. Adrian is one of those leaders who I’ll back again and again.”