Sensi.AI, an artificial intelligence company prevalent in the non-medical home care space, has raised $31 million in Series B funding.
The company works with the likes of BrightStar Care, Home Instead, Visiting Angels, Griswold and Always Best Care, according to its website. It leverages audio technology to detect abnormal events in a senior’s home.
In 2022, the company raised $14 million in Series A funding. The most recent funding round was led by Zeev Ventures and Insight Partners. Existing investors Entrée Capital, Flint Capital, Jibe Ventures and Secret Chord Ventures also participated in the round.
“When our customers say that Sensi is more than just technology, that there is a heart behind it, we know we are on the right path,” Sensi.AI Co-Founder and CEO Romi Gubes said in a statement. “We are dedicated to ensuring every senior can age with dignity in the comfort of their own home, the place they love most. This funding from renowned investors will help us continue to innovate our product and scale our go-to-market strategy, bringing our vision to life.”
The dementia care expert Teepa Snow is an advisory board member at Sensi.AI. Her Positive Approach to Care program previously partnered with the company.
“We’re very excited because Sensi is this sort of audio awareness system. It has that level of awareness — what’s happening in that environment 24/7. It’s not really recording every second, it’s just noticing things,” Snow previously told Home Health Care News. “When it picks up on something that’s care related, or distress related or good care related, or an anomaly, then it records about 10 seconds of an interaction right around that. Then it creates a signal to the dashboard that says this has happened, and it could be an indication that something good or not good is going on.”
Sensi.AI is based in Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, and also has offices in the United States. In addition to the aforementioned providers, it supports “over 80% of the largest home care providers in the U.S.,” according to the company.
Its technology extracts hundreds of insights on a senior’s well being, and that information is sent back to a clinical care team that includes social workers, occupational therapists, geriatric clinicians and nurses.
With staffing shortages persisting in home care, providers have recognized emerging technologies as one way to augment care staff in the home.
“When I came across Sensi, I immediately recognized the magnitude of the problem they were solving. It requires more than simply applying AI technology,” Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures, said in a statement. “I am confident that Sensi’s advanced audio AI technology along with their talented team will spearhead a transformation in the care ecosystem unlike anything seen before.”
Home-based care providers and AI
For years, home-based care provider leaders expressed their belief that AI solutions could ease pain points in the space.
Both home health and home care providers saw the opportunities to supplement staffing, or even to recruit or retain better. Home health providers also saw the opportunity to ease the documentation burden on clinicians, increasing efficiency, operations and retention rates.
Now, those solutions are actually beginning to be realized. Home care providers are partnering with platforms like Sensi.AI, and they’re also developing their own AI solutions.
Take the Phoenix-based Devoted Guardians as an example. It has completely transformed its recruiting process through AI, ensuring applicants are always receiving timely responses from the company.
“The minute someone is engaging us on any of these platforms, we have an AI system that’s going to engage back — answer any question that they might have and really drive them to scheduling interviews — to really cut down on those ghosting problems that we’ve been all seeing over the last couple of years,” Devoted Guardians CEO Aaron Sinykin told HHCN earlier this year.
Home health providers have also come up with AI documentation tools like Apricot, which was launched by the home health CEO Trent Smith. Apricot can reduce documentation time for home health nurses by “up to 85%,” according to Smith.
“I just saw a solution to some problems that we had,” Smith said. “And I was fortunate to know people that could help me build it. We found a nail and then went and built a hammer for it, as opposed to building a hammer and looking for a nail.”
While many providers are now applying AI, they’re using it in a variety of ways. The support for Sensi.AI is just another example of the possibilities for the emerging technologies in both home care and home health care.
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