Portfolio Company Spotlight | Genie Connect - Britbots

Genie Connect’s founders Rob Parkes and Tim Morgan both have elderly parents who found themselves living alone after losing their respective partners. Having seen first-hand how quickly a full and happy life can become lonely, whilst also wanting their parents to receive ongoing support without needing to move into institutional care, Rob and Tim created Genie Connect, a companion robot service using a voice enabled technology to offer connectivity and support to the UK’s older adults.

Genie Connect is technically similar to an Amazon Alexa but specifically targeted to the needs and technical usage limitations of the elderly. Principally, the device provides remote connection with local authority care centre representatives, together with providing an additional point of connection to family members, stimulating content and health and wellbeing by reminders such as to take medication on time or to attend appointments.

 Loneliness of elderly adults living alone is a major issue. Researchers at the London School of Economics have put a financial price on an "epidemic of loneliness", estimating it costs £6,000 per elderly person in health costs and pressure on local services. Age UK estimates there are 1.4 million elderly older people in the UK who are often lonely with this number estimated to rise to 2 million by 2030. By combining artificial-intelligence based interactions with an actual call centre staffed by remote carers, the Genie Connect system plans to make access to support services and companionship much more available, extending the period elderly adults can live independently in their own homes and by extension reducing the pressures created by elderly adults moving into residential care.

 The Genie product offering aligns with huge demographic shifts taking place.

 “Social care funding is squeezed in the face of demand for more, better care.” says Genie Connect Project Manager, Imogen. “But there aren’t enough care workers, even if there was funding for them. Service Robotics has developed a usable, scalable and independent living solution for older adults. We've built an awesome team with a variety of experiences which has enabled us to be successful in signing our first contracts, and put ourselves in the unique position of becoming experts in an emerging market that is involved in solving one of our society’s biggest problems.

 “Commercial launch is perfectly timed to take advantage of the growing requirement for remote care, the acceptance of Age-tech solutions, and fuelled by resource constraints and Covid-19. We aim to have a fleet size of 16,000 with approximately 20 local authority partners by the end of 2022.”

Britbots is a specialist UK based Pre-Seed investment fund, investing in 10 new pre-seed companies per year. We focus on companies using artificial intelligence, robotics or other automation technologies to develop productivity gains