Home care provider Cera Care buys Mears Care in £30m deal

The home care provider Cera Care which only formed three years ago has bought Mears Care in a £30m deal, which is set to make Cera Care one of the biggest home care companies in the UK.

The acquisition means Cera Care now has 2,000 employees and 20 offices across the country delivering over 10,000 visits a day.

Up till now Cera Care has just operated in London. With this acquisition, it has revealed it plans to use digital and artificial intelligence to transform social care.

Cera Care’s chief executive Dr Ben Maruthappu said: “Our acquisition of Mears Care gives us the opportunity to transform a traditional care service into an innovative care provider, that operates on the frontier of revolutionising social care.

“This milestone will provide us with much greater national coverage, combined with a strong network and talent-base, that takes our offering to a new level, serving many more users, and empowering many more care workers – making Cera the leader in modern and effective elderly care.”

He added: “Since our launch in 2016, we have demonstrated our commitment to improving the quality of care provided to older people. Through the development and use of pioneering new technologies, we are transforming the lives of users and front-line staff, while working with the NHS to deliver better integrated services across the country.”

Cera Care was co-founded by Dr Ben Maruthappu in 2016. Since then, the company has been using Smart Care technology, which includes devices such as machine learning algorithms that predict health deteriorations before they occur and its Dynamic Tasks platform – a so called Google Maps for care which uses artificial intelligence to recommend actions to care workers.

Users of Cera Care can book and coordinate emergency or long-term care from their smartphone. Family members can also send messages to and receive updates from the care worker in real time via Cera’s online portal.

Cera Care plans to make these innovations also available to the people it is now caring for with its acquisition of Mears Care.

Cera Care also has partnerships with organisations such as the NHS, Uber, Deliveroo and IBM.

In 2017, it entered into a pioneering partnership with taxi app Uber, aiming to get housebound elderly out and about.

The partnership means care workers at Cera Care use Uber to get to the people they are caring for and also enable people receiving care to book cars so they can get out and about when they would otherwise have been housebound, or had to rely on someone else.

Disabled customers, or those who need a little extra help, are able to book UberASSIST – or a fully wheelchair accessible vehicle through UberWAV – driven by one of Uber’s drivers, who have been through a specially designed disability equality training course.

Cera Care has revealed it plans to make further acquisitions and diversify its services to complex care and home diagnostics.

Its advisory board is chaired by Sir David Behan, ex-chief executive of the Care Quality Commission (CQC), and its investors include the ex-chair of Davos and former chief executive of JustEat.

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