It’s Time for the Annual AgeTech Review – Who Could Have Guessed All This Would Happen in 2021?

2021 has been an exciting year for the agetech ecosystem. We’ve seen a number of unicorns emerge and some interesting mergers and acquisitions. Let’s take a look back at the highlights from 2021!

New Unicorns!

Perhaps the most notable development of the year was the number of startups that achieved unicorn status. Honor, Papa and AlayaCare have raised significant rounds of funding this year and are now valued at over $1 billion. This is an exciting development for a number of reasons:

1. We get to see agetech startups mature and start to bring in big serious revenue. Unlike some companies valued at or above $1 billion with zero revenue, our agetech unicorns actually have annual recurring revenue to justify those billion dollar valuations. According to Growjo, Honor’s annual revenue is ~$159M, Alayacare brings in ~$56M annually, and Papa has ~$24M in annual revenue.
2. We get to see these companies use the funding to expand their hold of the market or enter new markets. Honor acquired Home Instead and Papa launched Papa Health.
3. We *finally* get to see agetech companies grow as independent entities and carve out a piece of the market for themselves, rather than see them get acquired early-on and then swallowed by their parent company. Remember GreatCall? It was acquired by Best Buy for $800M, and in 2021 got rebranded to Lively. ClearCare which was acquired by Wellsky also got rebranded this year. While there’s no doubt in my mind that there are good, business-oriented reasons behind those rebrands, I can’t help but wonder where we could have seen either of those companies, had they continued to run independently, even as an independent subsidiary within those giant companies.

Mergers and Acquisitions

There were a number of strategic acquisitions in 2021, the most notable are:

Honor’s acquisition of Home Instead – which instantly transformed Honor from a medium-sized player in a crowded and fragmented market, to the largest home care franchise in the world.

OATS’ acquisition by the AARP will enable OATS to expand its reach to the 38 million members the AARP has, and allows the AARP to offer the much-needed service of digital education to its members.

The most intriguing acquisition is arguably Aging2.0’s acquisition by the Louisville Healthcare Council. The Louisville Healthcare Council (LHCC) is a non-profit organization that was formed in 2017, as a consortium of healthcare companies looking to “leverage the strengths and assets of its members to solve important problems that extend beyond the scope of any one single member company”. Aging2.0 brings to the table its network of 40k+ innovators across 31 countries – the biggest network in the world that has been focused on innovation in aging since it’s birth in 2012.

Tammy York Day, President and CEO of LHCC, commented on the acquisition in a joint press release: “This gives us an opportunity, with input from the entire Aging2.0 community, to invigorate the brand and harness the group’s collective power and influence to connect innovation and real-world solutions to industry”.

Other notable acquisitions include:

• Best Buy acquired Current Health to help make home the center of health
• Alayacare acquired Delta Health Technologies to boost its US presence
• The Helper Bees (THB) acquired HealthAlign to expand into Medicare Advantage.
• Connect America acquired its competitor, Phillips Lifeline, to increase market share