Home care startup to scale across the North East…

Home care startup to scale across the North East following £2.1m funding

Care provider BelleVie is looking to scale up following £2.1m of funding secured from a range of investors.

The start-up, which has bases in Northumberland and Oxford, says it will expand its operations further into Tyne and Wear thanks to the injection, which comes in a package of seed and grant funding. A £1.6m seed funding round was led by Skagen Conscience Capital and featuring the North East Innovation Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Northstar Ventures, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Treebeard Trust.

The move has also unlocked £500,000 grant funding from UKRI's Healthy Ageing Challenge managed by Innovate UK and brings the total BelleVie has raised since its incorporation in 2019 to £3.4m. BelleVie provides a range of services including companionship, housework and specialist care for people living with dementia, Parkinson's disease and cancer.

The business says it is inspired by the Buurtzorg model - meaning "neighbourhood care" in Dutch - which centres around a person with care needs and balances informal support networks with a dedicated team and other professional tools. BelleVie's subscription-funded, 10-strong teams of wellbeing support workers are said to be afforded more time to provide care to their clients.

In contrast to some firms in the care industry, the firm says the majority of its team are paid employees rather than zero-hours contractors. It also says the majority of its recruits come from non-care background and believes its model can go some way to solving the staffing problems that are a feature of the care crisis.

North East Wellbeing leader Cath Corner said: "We couldn’t be more thrilled to receive this support for BelleVie in the North East. It allows us to expand our operations, offering more local people our high quality home care, helping more people to live well at home for as long as safely possible. It also enables us to recruit more people from within the local community for whom we can offer guaranteed, contracted hours, flexible working and a lovely local team to work in."

BelleVie co-founder and CEO Trudie Fell said: "We’re thrilled to have the backing of a great group of impact investors; their belief in us is great validation of our model. This investment means we can accelerate our mission to reinvent the future of work in care, creating more fulfilling careers in care, and supporting more people to thrive at home; all of which addresses one of society’s most pressing challenges."

Alasdair Greig, director at Northstar Ventures, said: "We are thrilled to be supporting a company that has such a novel and disruptive approach to solving the care crisis, one of our most intractable societal challenges. The BelleVie model drives dramatic improvement in the lives of both care workers and the people they support, and we look forward to seeing it scaled rapidly across the UK."

Helen Crampin, innovation and technology lead at UKRI Healthy Ageing Challenge said: "We’re pleased to support this innovative model in the care sector, from our Innovate UK funding partnership with Northstar Ventures. We aim to work with partners to support businesses that are focused on helping people to remain active, productive, independent and socially connected across the generations. Developing new models of care that lead to benefits for both carers and older people is an important issue for the future."

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