Avanlee Care, a platform to engage family caregivers, has clinched $3.5 million in seed funding, Fierce Healthcare has learned.
The round was led by BEA Venture Fund, with participation from angel investor Esther Dyson, who is Avanlee’s board chair, Chrysalis Ventures and FairBridge VC. Avanlee will use the capital, which brings its total raised to $6 million, to expand across the Medicare Advantage market.
Avanlee Care helps MA plans and other organizations engage caregivers within their member populations, enabling caregivers to take action and organizations to measure the impact. On the Avanlee platform, caregivers can schedule appointments, manage medications, connect with retailers, communicate with their plan and provider, get vaccination reminders and search for providers. Meanwhile, payers get insight into caregiver burnout and member health trend data.
“Avanlee Care is addressing an enormous and underutilized resource within healthcare,” Melissa Bradley, founder and managing partner of BEA Venture Fund, said in a comment. “As healthcare organizations look for more effective ways to improve engagement and outcomes, Avanlee is offering the infrastructure to make caregivers part of that strategy. We believe that creates a significant opportunity to improve both the caregiver experience and healthcare outcomes at scale.”
Founded in 2020, Avanlee began as a direct-to-consumer app, since transitioning into the enterprise space. It is fully integrated with Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs as its lead pharmacy partner for discounted medications, and is in discussions with a national, undisclosed MA plan to bring its platform to members with an assigned caregiver. As part of an initial potential pilot with this plan, thousands of members with an assigned caregiver would participate in Avanlee, with a broader expansion planned for mid-2027. Additionally, Avanlee is working toward a separate unnamed integration with a national pharmacy partner for delivering medications.
“We are excited to work with Avanlee Care. We share a common mission: to provide lower costs on prescribed medications, saving money for the unpaid family caregiver and their loved one, the care-receiver,” Mark Cuban, co-founder of Cost Plus Drug Company, told Fierce Healthcare.
Nearly 1 in 4 Americans provide ongoing care for an adult or child with a complex medical condition or a disability, coordinating medications, appointments, transportation, food and other needs. Yet by overlooking the person managing a member’s care and day-to-day living, plans’ efforts to engage MA members are less effective, Avanlee executives argue.
“Caregivers spend an astronomical amount of time having to juggle their career, their families, and suddenly now I’m thrust into this role of I’m a caregiver for my mom…so saving time is huge,” Avanlee Christine, co-founder and CEO of Avanlee Care, told Fierce Healthcare exclusively. Christine, who grew up with a grandfather with Parkinson’s and dementia, was inspired to build the platform that could have supported her mom when she was caregiving.
Avanlee offers caregiver wellness tools on its platform, which 59% of past users have engaged with. Over half of consistent users also reported a decrease in overall stress. In its DTC days, Avanlee supported thousands of families, claiming it saved their caregivers thousands of hours. The wellness tools include a weekly questionnaire on stress and educational resources on topics such as estate planning, life planning and legal services. Caregivers can add other relatives to the platform for extra visibility or support, and Avanlee also facilitates grocery delivery through an integration with Walmart (their pricing applies). “If the caregiver fails, the one ultimately receiving care fails,” Christine said.
This stress survey becomes a key data stream for Avanlee plan partners, allowing them to evaluate caregiver burnout. Avanlee's platform also provides payers with insights about appointment bookings, home health services and medication adherence.
There’s a reason Avanlee is targeting MA to start. Nearly two-thirds of caregivers say MA makes caregiving duties easier to manage than traditional Medicare, according to one survey. Avanlee is also interested in eventually expanding to dual-eligibles. "There's a lot of tailwinds in caregiving for both Medicare and Medicaid and those dually eligible populations,” Eric Scott, Avanlee’s chief growth officer, said.
In order to streamline scheduling, Avanlee is seeking MA partners that allow it to also tap into their provider networks. Avanlee can automatically schedule appointments when prompted by a health plan, such as annual wellness visits or cancer screenings. Caregivers can also manually add their existing appointments to get reminders. In the near future, Avanlee plans to let caregivers book ad hoc appointments for needs beyond those specifically requested by the health plan.
Avanlee charges payers per-member-per-month and is available at no direct cost to the caregiver. It behooves plans to support this population, Christine argues, not only because of their influence over member outcomes, but also because they could become a loyal future customer base. “You want to build a relationship with that adult daughter or son, because you take such good care of their mom,” Christine said.
Avanlee is incorporating AI to reduce friction for caregivers, like summarizing caregiver notes recorded via audio, recommending providers based on caregiver preferences and matching users’ questions with curated resources. It also makes recommendations to caregivers based on a number of insights, including what medications a member is taking, what conditions they have and what their social needs are. These AI features are powered by AWS Bedrock, with requests handled within Avanlee’s cloud environment rather than being sent to a third-party model provider.
“How do we make it the new norm in healthcare that these people are part of healthcare for mom or dad on day one,” Christine said.