You have recently been selected for the Tech Nation’s Future Fifty programme. What are your expectations and how does it feel to be identified as a future unicorn?
We’re delighted to have this recognition and to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Starling Bank, Deliveroo and Revolut.
Being a part of Tech Nation’s Future Fifty programme gives us a unique opportunity to collaborate with some of Britain’s most promising businesses. We’re excited to gain - and share - insights and support on the challenges we share as companies at a similar stage in growth, on topics such as talent, regulatory and market navigation, to investment.
What was the catalyst for launching Birdie?
At Birdie, our mission is to reinvent care through technology to enable older adults to live longer, happier and more independent lives.
The catalyst for this journey was a personal experience with my grandfather which led me to look better at how we look after our elders at home. We quickly realised that the home healthcare sector had been left behind in the digital revolution and to properly serve an ageing population, the sector needed a complete overhaul.
I joined together with my co-founders in 2017 to find new and better ways to solve this critical challenge.
Tell me about the business - what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
We believe the future of healthcare is proactive and personalised, centred on the care recipient and firmly rooted in the community. To realise this vision, Birdie aims to build the best technology to assist everyone in the care ecosystem, including health and social care providers, family members and community members, to deliver the best, most personalised, care support at home.
At present, we’re focusing on a critical part of this challenge: the homecare sector. Our product is a powerful homecare technology platform that supports every part of a care provider’s operations, from care management to rostering, finance, auditing and communication. In digitising these processes, we’re able to create the efficiencies that are so critical in a sector that’s short on workforce, funding and time, helping businesses of all sizes to thrive.
This efficiency also enables the delivery of higher standards of care - by ensuring that each care recipient’s individual needs are meticulously documented and brought to a professional’s attention, we help each person receive the best care possible.
The key for Birdie is that we don’t stop once processes that were once paper-based have become digitised: we believe in the power of data to be able to solve new problems and introduce new ideas. For example, our unique Q Score automatically takes day-to-day inputs and from them, shows how an agency would perform against CQC inspection criteria - a game-changing way to manage quality assurance.
We’re also proud to have had a partner-centric philosophy since day one. By collaborating closely with the care providers and professionals who use Birdie, we ensure that quality care is delivered and that partners can grow.
This approach is really reflected in how we view our place in the market. We’re here to try to support a critical industry - and that support doesn’t stop at our technology. That’s why earlier this year, we launched Flock, a community where care professionals can share insights, build relationships and get access to content and events. Flock has since grown to become the 4th largest care community in the UK, gaining over 1,200 members in just a few months.
How has the business evolved since its launch? When was this?
We’re incredibly proud of the way that Birdie has evolved since our launch in 2017. Over the last four years, we’ve grown 5435% and ranked 6th in the 2023 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 and in the top 5% of fastest-growing tech companies in EMEA.
In terms of our market share, we now support the daily care of 60,000 older people through our partnership with over 1,000 home care providers. As an all-in-one solution for care providers, we saved agencies a collective 353,090 hours, or 14,712 days, in care planning in 2023. Demand for our services has increased 300% year-on-year, which shows we’re on a great track for continued success.
As Birdie has grown, we’ve built one of Europe’s largest home healthcare datasets, collecting 1.8 billion data points in the last year alone. This data fuels insights for care businesses, paving the way for more personalised and proactive care solutions.
Tell us about the working culture at Birdie.
At Birdie, we’ve developed a culture that encourages innovation from the ground up. We aim to be at the forefront of the health tech revolution, so it’s important that our team can bring these goals to life within a supportive environment.
In order to do this, we dedicate significant time and effort to making sure Birdie is a great place to work. We offer a wide variety of benefits, from flexible working hours and work-from-anywhere flexibility to generous parental and fertility leave. And because we encourage everyone at Birdie to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset, we offer a personal development budget for each member of staff.
To make sure that this meets the needs of our team, we conduct quarterly employee barometer checks and have rigorous processes to make sure that feedback is heard and actioned across the org.
What is your favourite thing about being a founder?
My favourite thing about being a founder is building. Building a real solution to a real problem. Building a team of amazing people with strong values. Building a relationship with investors and other stakeholders. And building a vision for this industry together with our partners.
What’s in store for the future?
In terms of the next year, Birdie is looking to grow within the UK to support even more home health and care providers. We’re also expanding into new markets, having recently launched operations in Germany, with a vision to support ageing populations worldwide. Additionally, we want to improve our usage of NLP and AI tools to improve the intuitive intelligence of our digital platform.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
The biggest piece of advice I’d give to other founders, and indeed those looking to start their own business, is to stick to your guns. As a founder, you’ll need to stay faithful to a vision, and to values that are truly transformative for society. Then, you can be laser-focused on the execution. If you want to make a positive social impact, keeping in mind why you are driving this change is key. You’ll experience doubt, headwinds and conflicting advice. You’ll take various paths, including some that lead to failure. What matters is serving a noble cause and being dedicated to it regardless of the outcome.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
I don’t have a super strict routine, but key components of it include daily exercising, a clear objective list of the day, blocked time for focus work, slack/emails and meetings to avoid multitasking. I’m really trying to find a wind-down activity at night, be it time with friends, family or other hobbies.
Max Parmentier is the CEO and cofounder at Birdie, the intelligent platform for homecare.
Tech Nation’s Future Fifty Programme is designed to support late-stage companies with access and growth opportunities, the programme has supported some of the UK’s most prominent unicorns, including Monzo, Darktrace, Revolut, Starling, Skyscanner and Deliveroo.
