CareYaya, a platform that matches people who need caregivers with healthcare students, is working to disrupt the caregiving industry. The startup, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt, is looking to enhance affordable in-home support, while also helping students prepare for their future healthcare careers.

The startup was founded in 2022 by Neal Shah, who came up with the idea for the startup based on his own experience as a caregiver for his wife after she became ill with cancer and various other ailments. During this time, Shah was a partner at a hedge fund and had to wind down his fund to become a full-time caregiver for two years. 

To get additional care for his wife, Shah hired college students who were studying healthcare to be caregivers for his wife. Shah learned that other families were doing the same thing informally by posting flyers at local campuses to find someone who was qualified to look after their loved one. 

“I was like, wouldn’t it be nice to just build a formal system for them to do it, where you don’t have to go to your local nursing school or your local undergrad campus and post flyers,” Shah told TechCrunch. “This is what I was doing. So we were like, if you can bring that into a formal capacity through a tech platform, you can make a big impact.” 

Fast-forward to 2024, and the platform now has over 25,000 students on its platform from numerous schools, including Duke University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Jose State, University of Texas at Austin, and more. 

CareYaya performs background checks on students who want to join the platform and then completes video-based interviews with them. On the user side, people can join the platform and then detail the type of care their loved one needs. CareYaya then matches students to families, whether it’s for one-off sessions or continuous care. After the first session, both parties can leave ratings.

The startup says it can help families save thousands of dollars on recurring senior care. While at-home care costs an average of $35 per hour in the U.S., CareYaya charges between $17 and $20 per hour.

Since the students providing the care are tech savvy, CareYaya is equipping them with AI-powered technology to recognize and track disease progression in patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia. The company recently launched an LLM (large language model) that integrates with smart glasses to gather visual data to help students provide better real-time assistance and conduct early dementia screening.

In terms of the future, CareYaya wants to explore expanding beyond the United States, as the platform has seen interest from people in places like Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.