BelleVie Care, an innovative home care provider working to modernise and improve adult home care across the North East, is proud to announce that it has received £2.1m in seed and grant funding from a group of ambitious, purpose-led investors who share its mission.
BelleVie’s Wellbeing Support Teams provide high-quality, award-winning care across Hexham, Prudhoe, Blyth, Cramlington and Morpeth, with the startup company expanding its operations across the rest of Northumberland and into Tyne-and-wear.
The £1.6mn seed funding round, led by Skagen Conscience Capital, will enable the company to scale up its home care network across the region. Also providing their backing to this seed round are the North East Innovation Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Northstar Ventures, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Treebeard Trust.
BelleVie’s services in the North East, which are rated ‘Good’ by the Care Quality Commission, support older people to thrive at home by deploying innovative ways of working inspired by the Dutch ‘Buurtzorg’ model. The company’s approach to providing care that values both the carers and the people they support is rated 9.2/10 by independently verified reviews website homecare.co.uk.
This investment has also unlocked a further £550,000 in grant funding from UKRI’s Healthy Ageing Challenge, delivered by Innovate UK, the government body supporting business-led innovation across sectors and regions. This brings the total received this funding round to £2.15mn, and the total the company has raised so far to £3.4mn.
BelleVie’s ‘Buurtzorg’-inspired care model centres around 10-person self-managing teams serving their local community, providing continuity of care and building trusted relationships. This model gives its Wellbeing Support Workers more time to provide meaningful care to the people they support.
Its services are funded by a unique monthly subscription model. Teams flex as the needs of those they support change, using bespoke rostering tools to rapidly adapt.
The vast majority of BelleVie’s team members are paid employees, rather than zero-hours contractors, and the company is proud to be an accredited Living Wage Employer. BelleVie recruits people based on their values rather than their previous experience. With the majority of its employees coming from a non-care background, its excellent onboarding and training, and a 66% employee Net Promoter Score (NPS), BelleVie is proving that it can solve the recruitment and retention problems at the heart of the care crisis.
The unique insights gained by its teams on the ground are enabling it to build a managed marketplace of third party products and services, providing whatever people need to live their best lives at home.
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”.
Commenting on the latest funding round, 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.”
Jack Goldstein, Investment Director, of Skagen Conscience Capital, said “We are incredibly proud to empower BelleVie Care in their goal to support older people to thrive at home. The way adult home care is currently delivered in the UK requires fixing, and BelleVie’s multi-award winning operating model and technology platform will do just that.”
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.”
Denise Holle, Head of Social Investment at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said “Through its social investment in BelleVie, Joseph Rowntree Foundation is furthering its mission to inspire social change and address the root causes of poverty and economic insecurity. BelleVie is reinventing the delivery and business model for home care in the UK. It has put carers and clients at the heart of its model and is using technology to enable, rather than replace, more and better human interactions. BelleVie is also an accredited Living Wage Employer, and this is another important aspect of its operating model which JRF is delighted to be supporting.”
Helen Crampin, Innovation and Technology Lead, 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”
