Why We Invested in Care Hero
- Erika Lucas
- Sep 24
- 4 min read
At VEST Her Ventures, our investment decisions are grounded in a deep respect for women’s labor, paid and unpaid, and a belief that economic systems must evolve to value caregiving.
That’s why we’re proud to announce our investment in Care Hero, an AI-powered marketplace that connects families with certified caregivers through insurance-covered home care programs. While the current caregiving system is far from equitable, Care Hero is building infrastructure that helps shift the landscape, even if incrementally, toward a more dignified, accessible, and sustainable future.
The Problem: An Aging Population, a Fractured System
By 2030, over 73 million Americans will be over 65. Most want to age at home, and yet, the infrastructure to support aging in place is limited, expensive, and unevenly distributed.
At the same time, more than 5 million caregivers, the vast majority of whom are women, are navigating burnout, low wages, and administrative chaos in a system that undervalues their work. The home care industry is fragmented, often paper-based, and plagued by slow credentialing, inconsistent quality standards, and complex billing processes that disproportionately harm both caregivers and care recipients.
And while insurance can help, it often doesn’t. Reimbursement structures are complicated. Programs like Medicaid vary wildly by state. Medicare has historically offered little for non-medical home care, and newer pilots like Medicare GUIDE are promising but limited in scope. The result: families are often forced into impossible trade-offs between quality, cost, and availability of care. We know this reality because many of us have lived it, as daughters, mothers, friends, and advocates.
Why Care Hero
What stood out to us about Care Hero is that it doesn’t just aim to provide more caregivers, it’s building the tech infrastructure to connect, credential, deploy, and pay them at scale, starting with partnerships inside the Medicare GUIDE model.
Care Hero’s platform rapidly matches families with vetted caregivers, often within 48 hours, using AI to optimize for location, availability, pay, and care needs. It also automates visit verification, shift pricing, billing, and compliance. Unlike traditional home care agencies, Care Hero centers the caregiver experience. Their platform offers:
Better pay and faster onboarding
24/7 clinical support and GPS-verified safety protocols
Tools that can be licensed directly to caregivers or care agencies
This workforce, predominantly women, and often women of color, deserves not just jobs, but good jobs. Care Hero helps elevate their work through training, financial tools, and systems designed to reduce administrative burden.
Care Hero isn't targeting out-of-pocket consumers. Instead, they work directly with health systems, Medicare Advantage plans, and ACOs to fill the growing need for in-home, non-medical support. That infrastructure approach allows them to:
Integrate into the Medicare GUIDE program (covering dementia-related care)
Offer reimbursed services for eligible families
Provide transparent billing and compliance for providers
Caregivers as Healthcare Partners
Through their early work with healthcare organizations under the Medicare GUIDE model, Care Hero has uncovered a powerful but often overlooked truth: caregivers are capturing valuable insights that could significantly improve clinical decision-making. Despite being on the front lines, interacting daily with patients, these caregivers' observations are rarely integrated into care planning.
Many professional caregivers have medical training and the potential to serve as true extensions of the clinical team. Yet, they are too often dismissed as low-skill labor rather than recognized as vital contributors to patient outcomes.
Care Hero is working to change that. Their vision includes building the infrastructure needed to collect caregiver insights and share them seamlessly with families, physicians, and care managers. By doing so, they are helping to transform caregiving from isolated, manual work into an integrated component of healthcare delivery, one where caregivers are seen, heard, and valued as part of the team.
About the Co-Founders
Jamie Gong, Co-founder and CEO of Care Hero, brings deep personal and professional commitment to senior care. Her passion stems from eight years supporting her grandmother with Alzheimer’s. Before Care Hero, Jamie founded Chunfeng Bistro, scaling a DTC food brand to $5M in sales, and held roles at Bain & Company and HarbourVest Partners. She recently earned her MBA from Harvard Business School (Class of '24).
Henry Chan, Co-founder and CTO, brings over 15 years of engineering experience from companies like Klaviyo and WorkOS, where he built products at scale. Henry also worked as a companion driver, taking elderly patients to appointments, an experience that shaped his empathy and understanding of caregiving. He is also a family caregiver.
Both Jamie and Henry are currently enrolled in CNA classes to become certified caregivers themselves, further deepening their insight into the workforce they’re serving.
Investing in Infrastructure and Policy Advocacy
AT VEST, we’re investing in solutions and we’re also advocating for system change.
The caregiving system in the U.S. is deeply under-resourced, fragmented, and inequitable. We know technology alone isn’t enough. Long-term care requires long-term policy vision: expanded insurance coverage, caregiver pay reform, and universal access to home-based support. But we also need better tools for the system we have today.
That’s where Care Hero comes in, building infrastructure that helps caregivers work more efficiently, families access reimbursed care more easily, and health systems scale in-home services that meet real needs.
But we know this is not a full solution. It’s a step forward and one aligned with our mission to make women’s labor more visible, more valuable, and better supported.
To all caregivers, paid or unpaid, we see you, and we are committed to building a future that sees you too.
Learn more about our investment approach and portfolio companies at www.VESTHer.co/vestherventures