Here’s How This Startup Uses AI To Help Individuals With Long-Term Care Expenses

A San Francisco startup, Waterlily, uses AI to simplify long-term care planning and costs. The company was founded in 2021 by Lily Vittayarukskul, whose aunt was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer. After receiving the diagnosis, Vittayarukskul’s family helped her aunt with medical costs, telling TechCrunch, “It wiped us out financially.”

Vittayarukskul, who was studying aerospace engineering when her aunt received her diagnosis, explained that the emotional and financial effects were so traumatic it encouraged her to change her degree to genetic and data science.

How does Waterlily help individuals with long-term care costs and planning?

Waterlily helps individuals with long-term care options by giving users funding plans and modeling costs. It seeks to make the process smoother for financial advisors and insurance agents so they can advise the right financial products based on a family’s predicted long-term care needs.

Vittayarukskul explains that most people start thinking about long-term care when they’re around 65 and 70 or just before they need care. But, this is usually too late in several cases.

The company uses artificial intelligence to predict a family’s cost of long-term care needs and then advises them to create a care plan and examine the best way to pay for the expenses. It does this by drawing from over 500 million data points and machine learning algorithms utilizing its AI modeling software to personalize care and cost predictions and foresee the “when,” “how,” and “how much” of an individual’s possible long-term care needs.

The app can be used by any individual over the age of 40.

Securing $7 million in seed funding

The startup raised $7 million in seed funding led by John Kim, founding partner of Brewer Lane Ventures. It also secured strategic investments from Genworth, Nationwide, and Edward Jones. Previously, Waterlily raised a $2.2 million pre-seed round from investors like Scott Barclay, managing director of healthcare at Insight Partners.

It hopes to use the funding to expand its engineering data science and enterprise management teams while building on its AI models and data partnerships. Additionally, it intends to grow its sales and marketing initiatives. They currently have nine full-time employees as well as some contractors.

Waterlily would like to extend its business to those with disabilities, critical illnesses, hospital indemnity, and Medicare planning, or “really any area where advanced predictive modeling would help families make better life and health coverage decisions,” Vittayarukskul adds.

Image: Waterlily