While everybody is focused on self-driving cars, Shone is working on autonomous technologies for container ships. The startup doesn’t want to turn those giant ships into unmanned vehicles, but it wants to help seafarers and make ships more efficient.

After attending Y Combinator, Shone recently raised a $4 million round from Alven, Liquid 2, Paul Graham, David Marcus and D. Scott Phoenix.

“The basic idea is that autonomous ships are coming. Overall, it seems unavoidable,” co-founder and CEO Ugo Vollmer told me. “And yet, there are still 25 people on the boat and it runs on Windows.”

The team spent a lot of time talking with people working in the shipping industry to understand their needs. After traveling on container ships and buying a tiny boat for prototyping, Shone is already working with a shipping company to retrofit their ships with their technology.

“Our vision is that it’s going to happen progressively,” Vollmer said. “There will be a lot of navigation assistance systems first.”

At first, it could lead to fewer people on the boat. There are around 15 people maintaining the engine and the machinery. These people won’t go away any time soon. But there are also around ten people who are keeping an eye on the radar, on the different tools and also on the sea itself. They rotate as they need to have a small team in the cabin 24/7.

This second team could need some help, and this is where Shone shines. The startup adds a few sensors but mostly hooks their system to existing sensors. While there are a ton of sensors already, none of them communicate together.

Shone can combine all this data and analyze it to give some insights. Eventually, the startup plans to recommend different courses to save some fuel and time. Existing autopilot solutions on ships is more like cruise control in cars. You can follow a predetermined path, but you can’t say “let’s go from A to B”.

And saving fuel is key when it comes to global warming. Each ship carries a mountain of goods, so it’s quite efficient when you think about the impact of one ton of goods. But if you can make a container ship slightly more efficient, it would have a huge impact on the environment.

“If you can make a 1 percent optimization, you have a bigger impact than Tesla today,” Vollmer said. It’s hard to compare those two things as cars and ships are different beasts though.

For now, Shone is only focusing on deep sea. The crew doesn’t handle the first and last mile anyway as someone from the harbor usually comes on board to guide you to the dock.

Shone has signed a partnership with CMA CGM to collect data and add some hardware devices. It’s still early days for Shone as the company is first focusing on situational awareness before moving further into recommendations.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with William Hsu of Mucker Capital was recorded in...

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On the busiest nights, a restaurant can’t afford to even lose a dishwasher to getting sick or not being around — or simply ghosting on the company — and end up frustrating the whole experience for the rest of the staff and restaurant goers.

It’s a problem that Will Pacio was acutely familiar with during his time at Spice Kit, and it’s why he and Dave Lu — who didn’t really have much experience other than delivering Chinese food in high school, but wanted to get into the industry — started Pared. It essentially serves as an on-demand tool for restaurant workers, who might find themselves already working across multiple different jobs or multiple different restaurants and are looking for a lifestyle over which they have some more control. The company said it has raised a $10 million financing round led by CRV, with existing investors Uncork Capital and True Ventures also participating. CRV partner Saar Gur is joining the company’s board of directors.

“Even if youI go [to Craigslist], it’ll take four to six weeks to get someone to show up,” Lu said. “You hire them, you train them, and then they don’t show up to work the very first day. Even if I paid overtime, I don’t have enough employees to cover the shifts. For [Pacio] it was a nightmare, and I just want to be able to tap an app to get that kid from Subway across the street who knows how to make sandwiches and make them for me.”

The app largely focuses on back-of-the-house operations like line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers, though it could theoretically extend to any part of the restaurant experience. Restaurants go to the app and say they are looking for what the app calls a ‘Pro’ in whatever role they need, and are able to book the employee right away for the slot they have in their schedule. It might come at a slight premium over the typical hire, but restaurants are already willing to pay overtime in order to cover those gaps and keep things moving smoothly, Lu said.

For employees, it’s a pretty similar experience — they see a job posted on the app, with a time slot, and they make themselves available for an hourly wage. The second benefit, Lu said, is that they can start to slowly make a name for themselves if they are able to prove out their skills and move up the ranks at any of those restaurants. The culinary community is a small one, he said, and it offers a lot of room to start building up a reputation as an exceptional chef or just finally get a first shot at a sauté position in the kitchen after working at the back of the house. That, too, might be part of the appeal of jumping on a service like Pared rather than just driving for Uber.

“On our platform, every shift and rating you get, every connection you get in the industry — and it’s a very tight network — you build up your own reputation or identity,” Lu said. “We’re helping them build up, it’s more like a race to the top than a race to the bottom. They start off as a prep cook, and they start getting offers for line cook positions. We might have videos for learning to do this or that. They can work their way up to build that reputation. It’s all about reputation, it’s about people you trust.”

And like Uber, that flexibility is one of the more critical selling points of the application. A line cook might want to spend some time in New York to learn the scene there, and with an app like Pared, they can get access to some potential openings at restaurants in the area. As their experience — and their reputation — builds up over time, Lu hopes Pared gets known as a launching point for many careers, in addition to just offering restaurant workers a more flexible lifestyle.

There are certainly larger platforms that aren’t just targeting the restaurant ecosystem, and look to be a more global hub for hourly workers. Shiftgig, which raised $20 million last year, is one interpretation of that idea. But by offering a more curated and focused experience — one for which a kind of aspirational chef might keep gravitating back toward because they hope to one day end up running their own kitchen — can help build up that reputation for having a reliable workforce that any restaurant can use.

ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.

Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.

The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.

Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users.  As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.

The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.

Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.

The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.

They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far it’s been working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.

If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they’ll have to end up Googling “liability insurance” at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.

Inaki Berenguer instead hopes they’ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.

“[When I had founded my previous company] when we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.” Berenguer said. “I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn’t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they’ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.”

CoverWallet is much like what Berenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn’t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.

But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple – especially if it’s a small- to medium-sized business that isn’t the kind of technically savvy ones you’ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it’ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.

“Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,” Berenguer said. “Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else. It’s like white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.”

There likely isn’t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. But Berenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, and then giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn’t one of the clients, Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 404th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 28, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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August Lock is getting into the homesharing industry, making the process of checking in an Airbnb guest a bit easier.

Airbnb has done what it can over the past few months to make checking in plain and simple. For example, the company built out a new tool that lets hosts spell out check-in instructions within the app, all in a simple flow, to make sure guests have all the info they need at their fingertips.

But that hasn’t solved the biggest problem of all: the key.

For one, people don’t often have a lot of interest in meeting strangers, especially when they’re fresh off a plane or road trip. Secondly, it’s annoying to block out that time (sometimes getting off work) to go hand off a key to an Airbnb guest. And then there’s the matter of getting keys copied or re-tooling your smart lock to temporarily offer a stranger access.

That’s where August comes in to play.

August lets Airbnb and Homeaway hosts link their accounts to August. When a guest books at their home, August will generate a smart code that lasts for the duration of the stay and no longer, letting the guest easily check-in and come and go without the host having to babysit the process.

Guests will receive their pin code and instructions via email.

Hosts simply need an August Smart Lock and Smart Keypad to start letting technology do the heavy lifting. And, in fact, August is running a deal right now for 25 percent off the Smarter Hosting Bundle, which includes an August Smart Lock, August Connect Wi-Fi Bridge and August Smart Keypad.

This, coupled with other startup services like Handy, should make becoming an Airbnb host as simple as tapping a few buttons.

Insurance-focused platform Guidewire Software (NYSE: GWRE) recently announced its third quarter results that outpaced market expectations. The company provides web-based tools to insurance companies...

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In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but it’s not always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.

It’s not typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.

“Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,” Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.

The software isn’t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.

Rinke says the software doesn’t simply find a solution and that’s the end of the story. It’s a continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn’t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.

“We tell them there are lots of answers. We don’t think there is one solution. All these little things don’t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find it’s easy to implement, ” he said.

It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone. What’s more, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that?)

The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren’t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.

“I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we’ve built and the traction we have. But for us it’s more important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,” Rinke said. He’s sees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.

But that doesn’t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.

I am very bullish about market opportunities that are large enough to build sizable businesses but not large enough such that VCs end up funding numerous competing companies. This case study shows...

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TourRadar, the online travel agency (OTA) that targets the multi-day touring market, continues to be on a roll. The Vienna, Austria-headquartered company, which also has offices in Brisbane and Toronto, has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

Consisting mostly of primary funding, the round is led by the Silicon Valley growth VC firm TCV, with participation from existing investors Cherry Ventures, Endeit Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Speedinvest. Notably, TCV previously backed Expedia and Airbnb and so has a very decent track record in travel.

Erik Blachford, a venture partner at TCV and already an angel investor in TourRadar, has joined the company’s supervisory board. Blachford was previously President and CEO of IAC Travel, managing all of IAC’s travel assets including Expedia and Hotels.com. Again, a very good fit for TourRadar as it looks to scale up going forward.

In a call, TourRadar co-founder and CEO Travis Pittman — who founded the company with his brother — told me he was glad to have finally got Blachford on his board. The pair first met at a conference a few years back when Pittman heard the ex-Expedia CEO wax lyrical about the need for an OTA that serviced the group multi-day tour industry. He approached him afterwards to say that TourRadar wanted to be that company.

Not to be confused with something like GetYourGuide, which focuses more on travel experiences that take up part or all of a single day, TourRadar is a place to book a multi-day tour in the same way you might book a package holiday. To deliver this, the company works with more than 600 large and small local tour operators across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. These include well-known operators such as G Adventures, Contiki, and Collette, and hundreds of specialty operators that otherwise would rely purely on local agents and word of mouth. In total, TourRadar offers more than 25,000 tours in 200 countries.

In fact, Pittman says TourRadar’s main competitor is large incumbent tour package companies, and that multi-day tours are one of the last areas of the travel industry that has not fully moved online. Another interesting tidbit regards TourRadar’s potential for growth: the company so far only targets english speaking consumers. Next on the roadmap is a lot more localisation, says the TourRadar CEO, with Germany, for example, a huge travel market.

To that end, TourRadar says it intends to use the funding to expand its team globally and to invest in the technology platform “to provide a personalized user experience for customers in new and existing source markets across the globe”. One area of focus will be developing a proper TourRadar mobile app — yes, really! — as Pittman reckons mobile, thus so far neglected, is a great platform for inspiration and discovery when deciding where to book your next tour.

More broadly, the platform supports operator partners in various ways, including offering instant bookings and tour review functionality, but there is room to go a lot further. This could include re-introducing community features to enable people who are planning to be in the same tour cohort to get in touch with one another before, during and after a tour.

Jay-Z is behind a new venture fund called Marcy Venture Partners that is being launched with Walden Venture Capital managing director Larry Marcus and longtime business partner Roc Nation president Jay Brown, according to California regulatory filings.

The fund was first reported by Axios. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter is no stranger to the venture world. The rap artist, producer and entrepreneur invested in Uber’s Series B round in 2011 when the company had a pre-money valuation of $300 million. Jay-Z has also invested in JetSmarter and Julep. Roc Nation backed Promise, a decarceration startup.

Jay-Z and Jay Brown were looking for a Silicon Valley partner for their fund last year. And at one time, it appeared they had landed on Sherpa Capital, a VC firm created by some of Uber’s other early investors. But that deal fell apart.

Now Walden Venture Capital’s Marcus will lead Marcy Venture Partners. Marcus has deep experience as an investor as an early backer of Pandora and Netflix. Marcus has also invested in sound and voice search startup SoundHound, retail tech company Skip and Terayon, which was acquired by Motorola.

Sramana Mitra: I think the Indian startup ecosystem is much larger than Europe right now. Hussain Kanji: It is, but when you look at the global unicorns and where they’re coming from, about 50% of...

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Getting mental health services can be burdensome. And if you’re already going through a tough time, you’re probably looking for help sooner than later. But based on the current landscape, it can take months to find the right therapist who also takes your insurance.

This is where Meru Health hopes to come in. By providing its service as a benefit for employers to offer to their employees, Meru Health can operate as a first line of treatment where people can get help in a matter of weeks, Meru Health co-founder and CEO Kristian Ranta told TechCrunch.

Ranta, who lost his brother to suicide a few years ago, said there are “unfortunately lots of people suffering from depression and who are vulnerable to burnout.”

It’s true. Worldwide, more than 300 million people suffer from depression and 260 million suffer from anxiety disorders, according to the World Health Organization.

Meru Health offers an eight-week treatment program for depression, burnout and anxiety. The program, currently led by five licensed therapists, utilizes both cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral activation and mindfulness-based intervention. Provided as an employee benefit, Meru Health only charges companies if the patients report feeling any better.

Meru Health’s current customers include WeWork and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. To date, Meru Health says 75 percent of the people who go through its program report symptom reduction.

Other startups working in the mental health space include Pacifica and Lantern, a mental health startup that offers tools to deal with stress, anxiety and body image. To date, Lantern has raised more than $20 million in funding. Another one is Talkspace, which aims to be an alternative to traditional therapy.

Down the road, Meru Health may make its service available to everyday consumers, but right now, Ranta said the focus is on selling to larger employers and doing clinical research. Meru Health is also looking to bring on board a doctor to help with medication management and, possibly, even providing prescriptions, Ranta said. Meru Health, which is currently participating in Y Combinator, envisions bringing on a medical doctor post-YC.

Biplab Adhya and Venu Pemmaraju, Co-Heads of Wipro Ventures.

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What is the difference between pre-seed, post-seed and pre-Series A? This is not so simple anymore to understand. For entrepreneurs who are seeking financing for the first time, it’s not easy to...

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Sramana Mitra: The domain that I feel very bullish about is healthcare. There are vast swaths of the world that have no access to good healthcare. I think AI can turn that around. John Roese:...

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An app that has the needs of modern-day parents in mind, Winnie, has now raised $4 million in additional seed funding in a round led by Reach Capital. Other investors in the new round include Rethink Impact, Homebrew, Ludlow Ventures, Afore Capital, and BBG Ventures, among others. With the new funds, Winnie has raised $6.5 million to date.

The San Francisco-based startup, which begun its life as a directory of kid-friendly places largely serving the needs of newer parents, has since expanded to become a larger platform for parents.

Winnie was founded by Bay Area technologists, Sara Mauskopf, who spent time at Postmates, Twitter, YouTube and Google, and Anne Halsall, also from Postmates and Google, as well as Quora and Inkling.

As new parents themselves, they built Winnie out a personal need to find the sort of information parents crave – details you can’t easily dig up in Google Maps or Yelp.

For example, you can use Winnie to find nearby kid-friendly destinations like museums or parks, as well as those that welcome children with features like changing tables in restrooms, wide aisles in stores for stroller access, areas for nursing, and other things.

Winnie serves as a good example of what investing in women can achieve. Somehow, the young, 20-something men that receive the lion’s share of VC funding had never thought up the idea of app that helps new parents navigate the world. (I know, shocking, right?) And yet, the kind of questions that Winnie tries to answer are those that all parents, at some point, are curious about.

The data on Winnie is crowd-sourced, with details, ratings and reviews coming from other real parents. Listings in San Francisco may be more fleshed out than elsewhere, as that’s where Winnie got its start. However, the app is now available in 10,000 cities across the U.S., and has just surpassed over a million users.

In more recent months, Winnie has been working to expand beyond being a sort of “Yelp for parents,” and now features an online community where parents can ask questions and participate in discussions.

“The crowdsourced directory of family-friendly businesses is still a huge component of what we do…and this has grown to over 2 million places across the United States,” notes Winnie co-founder and CEO Sara Mauskopf. “But we also have these real-time answers to any parenting question from this authentic, supportive community,” she says, referring to Winnie’s online discussions.

The idea is that parents will be searching the web for answers to questions about toddler sleep issues or good local preschools or breastfeeding help, and Winnie’s answers will come up in search results, similar to other Q&A sites like Quora or Yahoo Answers.

“A lot of younger millennial parents are turning to Google to find answers to these questions,” adds Winnie co-founder and CPO Anne Halsall. “So we want to have the answer to these questions at the ready, and we want to have the best page. That’s an example of something that’s yield a lot of traffic for us, just because no one else had that data before Winnie,” she says.

Related to this expansion, Winnie is also serving this data across platforms, including – obviously – the web, in addition to its native app on iOS and Android. The hope is that, with the growth, business owners will come in to claim their pages on Winnie.com, too, and update their information.

In the near-term, the founders say they’ll put the funding to use building out more personalization features.

“As a technology company, we have a unique opportunity to give you this really tailored experience that grows with your family over time – so as your children are getting older, and you’re entering new phases of development, our product’s adapting and putting relevant information in front of you,” Halsall says. 

Data on businesses serving the needs of parents with older kids – like summer camps or driver’s ed classes, for example – are the kind of things Winnie will focus on as it grows to include information for more parents, instead of just those with younger children and babies.

Winnie will also use the funds to hire additional engineers to help it scale its platform.

Esteban Sosnik from Reach Capital joined Hunter Walk from Homebrew on Winnie’s board as a result of the funding.

The app is a free download for iOS and Android, and is available on the web at Winnie.com.

Seniors over 65 are one of the fastest growing age groups in the United States, but they are still an underserved market. Many don’t need assisted living or in-home care, but they do need help with transportation and errands. Most of all, however, the elderly want companionship. Papa, a service that bills itself as “grandkids on-demand,” wants to fill the gap by connecting college students, called Papa Pals, with seniors.

Named in honor of founder and chief executive officer Andrew Parker’s grandfather, the Miami-headquartered startup is currently participating in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Seniors can use Papa’s app (or a customer service line for those who don’t own a mobile device) to book a Papa Pal. Papa Pals might take seniors to the grocery store or doctor’s appointments, help with chores or teach them how to set up a new smartphone or tablet. They also provide company for seniors, many of whose own adult children or grandchildren are busy working or live far away. Papa is currently available in Florida and will began expanding into other states next year.

“What’s interesting is that people don’t always want to say they want companionship, even though their families say they do,” says Parker. “But when a visit ends up being six hours, that’s evident what it’s for.”

Before launching Papa, Parker was vice president of health systems at telehealth company MDLIVE. He lived near his grandfather, who had early onset dementia, and would often go over to help him with errands. One day, however, Parker was unable to go on a grocery run. Since his workload was increasing, Parker posted on Facebook for a helper. A woman named Andrea responded and after his family interviewed her and did a background check, she began assisting his grandfather regularly.

The experience made Parker realize there was a gap in the market for seniors who, like his grandfather, were mostly independent and don’t require a caregiver, but still needed occasional help from a trustworthy person. He decided to leave MDLIVE and began working on Papa to provide what he describes as “pre-care.”

Papa Pals are college students, many of whom are studying nursing, social work or hospitality. Before they are matched with seniors, Papa Pals undergo a background check and a motor vehicle records check and inspection. The company also asks them to complete a personality test. Parker describes the ideal Papa Pal as not only interested in working with seniors for career experience, but also outgoing, empathetic and patient.

“If you want to be a Papa Pal to make a couple extra dollars, then it’s probably not a good fit,” he says.

One of the most requested services is transportation. Many seniors need more than a Uber. They also want someone to help them shop and unload bags or sit with them in a doctor’s waiting room. Papa Pals also help with technology, like teaching seniors how to set up Netflix or video chat with their grandkids. The service starts at $15 an hour and a premium membership option allows seniors to interview Papa Pals, pick a team of helpers and request same-day appointments.

Parker says Papa has plans to expand into at least five states next year. The startup also wants to build an ecosystem of senior services, so when customers start to need more intensive services like in-home care, Papa can refer them to its partners.

While there are apps like Honor that help seniors find in-home caregivers, Papa’s on-demand service is unique. Parker says one of the things that will help it maintain an advantage against any future startup competitors is its backend, which enables it to match seniors with available Papa Pals quickly, whether they use its app or phone number. Papa Pals see an in-app dashboard that lets them accept appointments, then provides them with requests made by seniors or their families. The system also manages traffic and logistics and algorithmically calculates compensation for Papa Pals (on average, Parker says they make $20 to $30 per visit, which typically last about three hours).

Papa is currently gearing up for the introduction of new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits that will cover some of the services it offers, like transportation to medical appointments. The ruling will go into effect next year and Papa has begun initial discussions with providers of Medicare Advantage, which has about 20 million beneficiaries.

Papa is also expanding its business-to-business model by working with partners, including senior living facilities, to offer Papa Pal services to their residents.

“Papa’s mission for the long run is to support seniors and their families,” Parker says. “We see ourselves at the beginning of the process.”