“Why the hell is a UNC nursing student doing DoorDash?”
This rhetorical question posed by CareYaya cofounder and CEO Neal Shah serves as the informal mission statement behind his 3-year-old Research Triangle Park startup. Or at least behind one part of his evolving business.
CareYaya’s online platform connects families seeking in-home care to workers studying health care. Since the summer of 2023, the company has recorded caregiver job applications rise from a few thousand around Triangle universities to more than 40,000 across 16 states and Washington, D.C.
“I’m like running one of the largest care workforces in the country, with a six-person startup,” Shah said.
The business model intersects demand for aging care with students’ perpetual desire for part-time, “gig economy” jobs. Local rates start at $17 an hour, and CareYaya doesn’t take a cut. “We have a lot of other monetization strategies,” he said. “But I think the goal in the early-stage marketplace was just to kind of grow it fast and get something a lot of people are using.”
To date, CareYaya caregivers have completed sessions with 2,818 patients. Families pay workers direct after shifts, typically through Venmo. Besides making extra cash, students in pre-health tracks pursue the real-world experience of working with older patients, many of whom have conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, dementia or Parkinson’s disease.
“The money wasn’t too much a driving factor,” said Alec Marsh, a recent UNC-Chapel Hill graduate who studied neuroscience and began caregiving through CareYaya after his sophomore year. “A lot of it was kind of just seeing how I could get involved dealing with populations from a wide age range.”
AI to ease loneliness, AI to fight insurance denials
CareYaya aspires to do more than match young students with older adults. Through Shah and cofounder Gavry Eshet, it has developed a lineup of artificial intelligence technologies designed to cut through the limitations of the U.S. health care system.
There’s “Frank,” an artificial intelligence phone companion created to ease patient loneliness. Projecting a cheery male voice, Frank can’t access current events like the weather or the name of the U.S. president, but he, or rather it, can discuss classic books, describe a recent “trip” to the beach, and recall the names of patients’ family members. As CareYaya’s chief technology officer, Eshet built the large language model from actual conversations with seniors, some of which he collected himself.
“I think this has great potential,” Mary Bethel, board chair for the North Carolina Coalition on Aging, said after a test chat with Frank.
CareYaya has also trained Frank to spot patients’ cognitive decline and help users plan for end-of-life care. The latter is done through a pilot service called GoalCoach, which could gauge when patients are ready to discuss their final plans, said Dr. David Casarett, chief of palliative care at Duke Health.
“We’re thinking about GoalCoach as a way of setting the stage,” said Caserett, who is a CareYaya adviser and investor. “Really trying to get a sense for whether and when people are willing to sit down with a health care provider and have a really in-depth goals-of-care conversation.”
And in Counterforce Health, CareYaya has introduced an AI platform to help fight insurance claim denials. The technology can draft custom appeal letters, and the company is testing a voice assistant named “Maxwell” to guide users through an often-byzantine process.
“(In academia), you come up with an idea, and two years later you get a grant funded, and four years later you actually get results,” Caserett said. “This is actually going from zero to 60 in weeks instead of years. It’s cool.”
How CareYaya makes money
A prolific LinkedIn poster, Shah is outspoken about deficiencies he sees in traditional health care services. He managed a hedge fund in New York City before taking a career break in the late 2010s to care for his wife as she battled breast cancer. She survived, and the experience, he said, inspired his next business venture.
CareYaya graduated through Launch Chapel Hill, a startup accelerator supported by the town and local university. UNC was CareYaya’s first caregiver hub, followed by expansion into Duke, NC State and eventually out-of-state schools like Boston College, UC Berkeley and the University of Texas.
Shah credited CareYaya’s angel investors with allowing his company to mature without taking money from matching families to caregivers. The same allowance is being made for Counterforce Health, which has its claim denial appeal software being used in clinics for free.
Some revenue is already coming in, Shah said, as CareYaya sells caregivers training on dementia care. For now, Shah mostly supports his six full-time staff with investor backing and grants, including awards from the National Institute on Aging, the American Heart Association, Johns Hopkins University, and a new grant from the University of Pennsylvania.
Wearing baby blue uniforms that resemble scrubs, employees occupy a coworking office on the Frontier campus in Research Triangle Park. With just six desks, it’s still a tight space, and Shah predicted they’ll soon need more room.
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