Our Pre-Seed investment in Tendertec – the award winning AI startup opening the door to personalised, preventative and cost-effective elder care

We are delighted to announce our €400Κ Pre-Seed investment in Tendertec, the Cardiff-based, award-winning startup, opening the door to personalized, preventative, and cost-effective elder care.

Established in 2017 by Dr. Afroditi Konidari and Rui Zhang, Tendertec develops room sensing technology to support independent living for elderly and vulnerable people, providing their families the peace of mind that if anything harmful happens at their loved one’s home, it won’t go unnoticed. Their product, Tenderbox, is a safety and monitoring system enabling care providers to effectively monitor vulnerable people receiving care and make data-driven decisions in care planning, assessment and delivery. Tenderbox uses AI algorithms processing data fed from proprietary sensors. With one wall-mounted sensor per room, the Tenderbox system scans rooms to detect emergencies such as falls, daily living activities as well as unusual behavior and incidents such as forgetting to eat and drink that usually go unnoticed when people live alone.

In large parts of Europe and especially in the North and Central EU-28 Member States, 1 in 3 seniors currently live alone, with a growing number choosing to live at home till an increasingly advanced age. Their quality of life is directly related to the ability of care providers to effectively monitor seniors and deliver timely, person-centric and cost-effective care. As we age, we are far more likely to develop health issues, but with effective support, events such as falls which are a leading cause of long-term injury among seniors, can be alleviated. The global senior market is estimated at €753B, with 617M globally and over 97M seniors in Europe aged 65+, the fastest growing EU age group.

Existing solutions are based on predominately wearable products – wrist bands or pendant alarms – which depend on users to wear them at all times and are often not activated in time, or furniture-embedded sensors which can only report on user inactivity and tend to generate false alarms. Tendertec’s solution, on the other hand, is fully automated and does not require any action from the user. It automatically detects incidents and alerts in real-time whilst giving care providers access to behavioral data which enable them to add context to detected incidents in order to make data-driven decisions and prevent minor worries from turning into big problems. Potential clients include care & telecare providers, telecoms and insurance providers.

The investment will be used for scaling Tendertec’s team, product development, hardware production, and business development. Tendertec has been trialing its technology in two supported living sites in the UK. They have been awarded a €242K grant by the Welsh Government, won the “Disruptive Product” award by GE Healthcare at EIT Health’s “Health VentureLab” and have been named as one of Vodafone’s 5G DIG Top 20 start-ups with the most potential to take advantage of the advent of 5G internationally.

Tendertec CEO Dr. Afroditi Konidari explains: “Tendertec is an inspiration from a personal experience with elder relatives in my family. What makes us different is that we have been developing our technology with senior users, their carers and families participating at every stage from research to deployment to create products users love and accept in their lives. Tendertec’s technology does not require any user engagement or lifestyle change from the side of users; you don’t need to wear anything or change your routine. You just fit our sensor and forget about it, knowing that it’s always on for you to rely upon. We are really excited to receive Metavallon’s VC investment as it’s going to be used for our expansion and development, but also they are the right partner in what we expected to be a long and exciting journey ”.

“We are excited to join Tendertec at the start of their journey. The needs they address are twofold. First and foremost, improving safety, and subsequently, quality of life, for an increasingly large but vulnerable segment of Europe’s population; and secondly, the use of AI makes care provision more timely, cost-efficient and ultimately, more sustainable for providers.”, adds Metavallon VC Partner Yorgos Mousmoulas.

Metavallon VC is active in Pre-Seed investments such as the one in Tendertec, with company submissions evaluated on specific cut-off dates and next one coming up on June 2, 2019. Interested companies are invited to submit their investment proposals here. Metavallon VC also invests in Seed stage companies, with rolling assessment of investment proposals throughout the year.