Investors

The problem

The tools already exist. WhatsApp, spreadsheets, notebooks, hospital portals. The pain is not a missing app, it is that nothing holds the whole picture, so one person ends up carrying all of it, usually alone.

That shows up the same way in family after family. One person becomes the quarterback, holding every appointment and document with nobody to hand it to. When others do help, friction follows, because the workload is invisible and resentment builds before anyone names it. The person being cared for forgets what was said and feels shut out of decisions about their own life. And help is hard to find: one in two caregivers say so.

The market

More than 8 million Canadians are unpaid caregivers. Their work is worth roughly $97 billion a year, which is a measure of the burden being carried rather than a software market to capture. Close to 40% report distress: exhaustion, anxiety, burnout. One in two say finding information and support is difficult.

The number that matters is not the dollar figure. It is the size of the audience and how badly it is served. Millions of people, no coordination layer any of them would name, and a need that compounds every year as the population ages.

Figures from Statistics Canada (2022 to 2024), the Canadian Centre for Caregiving Excellence, and CIHI. National numbers; Care Colab starts in British Columbia.

Why now

Three things have lined up, and the product sits where they meet.

• The need compounds. An aging population and smaller, more scattered families mean fewer people carrying more, every year. The pressure only goes one way.
• AI adoption has crossed over. Even older and less technical people are trying it now. Most still under-use it, unsure what it can do, or wary of the companies behind it.
• The gap between those is the opening. People want help, simply, with a human still in control. Care Colab uses AI where it earns its place and keeps the person driving.

What is built

A complete product in production, not a prototype. Documents, notes, files, tasks, calendar, chat, granular sharing, and optional AI summaries generated from templates the user defines. Canadian data residency, no AI training on user content, and sharing off by default.

It was designed before it was built. I am a product designer, so the flows, the sharing model, and the security model were worked out deliberately, with AI accelerating the implementation rather than replacing the thinking. The stack is lean, and so is what it costs to run.

The quickest way to judge any of this is to open it. Try it free, no credit card, and you can have a workspace running in a couple of minutes.

How it makes money

One product, sold more than one way.

• Consumers, billing live today. Free to start, Pro at $14 a month, Max at $36. People pay for AI summary credits, storage, and custom templates.
• Professionals, in discovery. Coordinators and navigators paying to deliver client work inside the product, such as producing advance directives. The first partnership is underway with Patient Pathways, an independent healthcare navigation practice established in 2010.
• Organizations, later. Clinics, home care agencies, and community organizations equipping both families and staff with a shared coordination layer.

The premium line I most want to build next is connectors: pulling scattered material in from Drive, chat threads, audio, even exports from other AI tools. The easier it is to get everything in, the more this becomes the place it all lives.

Where things stand

Deliberately pre-promotion. The product is live and in real use with a close group while I refine it, and I have not opened the funnel yet because I would rather prove people will pay before spending to acquire them.

Bootstrapped to this point, which is the reason a product this complete exists at this stage at all. The next milestone is validation on both sides: families paying, and professionals paying to deliver work inside it. Early professional discovery is underway.

What I am looking for

Help reaching the next stage. Engineering capacity so the roadmap stops being bounded by one person, room to keep development focused rather than squeezed around other work, and the budget to start promoting Care Colab properly instead of waiting to be found.

I am not running a formal round. I am having conversations, and I am especially interested in Canadian investors, grant programs, and competitions aligned with care, health, and social impact.

How the company is structured

Care Colab is operated by Care Colab Solutions Ltd., a British Columbia benefit company. That is a legal structure rather than a certification: the public benefits the company commits to are set out in its articles, and directors are required to weigh those commitments alongside the interests of shareholders rather than considering financial return on its own.

In short, the company is committed to supporting families and care providers with accessible tools, reducing the administrative burden and interpersonal tension that caregiving creates, and helping caregivers protect their time and energy for direct care. The full commitments are on the About page.

I mention this early because it is material. If you are evaluating Care Colab as an investment, you should know how the company is obligated to weigh its decisions before diligence rather than during it. For investors aligned with care, health, and social impact I think it is a feature, but either way it should not come as a surprise.

Why me

I built this after coordinating my parents' care remotely: falls, cognitive decline, and the constant texting, repeating, and uneven load between my sister and me. The fragmentation did not cause the crisis, but it made it lonelier and harder than it needed to be.

Before Care Colab I spent years as a product designer in health technology, a good deal of it in rooms with seniors, caregivers, and the clinicians around them. That is why I trust the pattern rather than only my own experience of it. It is also why this is not simply a tool I built: the flows, the sharing model, and the security were worked out deliberately, to make an invisible workload visible. The longer version is on the about page.

Get in touch

If this is the kind of thing you want to be early on, or you just want to understand it better, I would be glad to talk.

Contact: invest@carecolab.ca