I first met Paul Jarvis, Co-Founder and CEO of Bateau in May of 2020, in the throes of the pandemic, when he was just starting to work with senior living companies. That was a critical time for senior living facilities, which were in the eye of the storm of a pandemic we were just starting to understand. Knowledge workers, like many of us, could retreat to our homes and still work online, but many people who play critical roles in our functioning society continued to get up every morning and carry on with their jobs without the option for remote work. Senior living care professionals were one of these subsets.
Paul spoke weekly with senior living teams, and one problem emerged as paramount to all others. It always began with — “Paul, what you’re selling sounds interesting, but the real challenge I need help with is seeing the full picture of my business when all my data is in different systems.” The timeline for such an analysis could take weeks, if not months. Like most amazing startups, the problem Bateau had to solve emerged when the team least expected it. Adding to the clarity was the challenge to meet the moment when clients were at their most vulnerable — quickly cementing its importance.
As I got to know Paul and Co-Founder/Chief Technology Officer Henry Hutcheson, I grew even more enamored with the senior living industry while learning to appreciate its many intricacies. Senior living facilities are complex and often have 5–6 distinct tools that they need to pull data from on a daily basis (payroll, eHR, CRM, property management, etc). This saturation coupled with a non-technical workforce makes data extraction archaic and hard to scale.
Americans spend $323B on senior care annually, and this number is expected to grow in the next few decades. Over the next 40 years, the US senior population is expected to nearly double (from 52M seniors to 95M) and these individuals are expected to live longer and require a higher level of assistance over time. This increased longevity will necessitate a growth in senior living industries — which are desperate for better software tools and data management in the back end, often ignored by most large software providers. The industry also went through a rapid digital transformation during COVID, when facilities were under a magnifying glass and their antiquated processes were brought to light.
Bateau today offers a software product called Resident360 that helps senior care facilities make sense of their data, which in turn helps increase revenue, reduce cost and deliver quality care. Bateau can consolidate data from different systems and track KPIs, forecast trends, streamline reporting to equity partners, and identify residents who need proactive attention.
With any early company, the team is reason 1, 2, and 3 to lead the investment — and my desire of wanting to back Paul and Henry was almost immediate. Former classmates at Dartmouth College, they came together to found Bateau after leading very different professional careers for the last seven years. Paul led operations on data integration projects for Palantir’s largest private sector customers in banking, oil & gas and pharma while Henry spent several years at Bridgewater Associates before teaching himself to learn to code and building products at Amperity and FullStory. Paul (though he will never tell you himself) also led the Dartmouth Rugby Team to the national championship twice, and was an All-American and under-19 US National Rugby Team member — so a love for competition and grit comes naturally to both founders. Beyond their impressive resumes, both founders have an innate sense of wanting to build something that “matters,” and that deeply resonated with me as I am passionate about companies and founders who are addressing the needs of the forgotten worker.
Venture capital money often goes to industries which seem to have it all, while others remain in the shadows. Senior living affects each one of us at some point. If not today, it likely will in the future. We at CRV are proud to support companies like Bateau that are creating software that will truly have an impact on senior living facilities making their day to day operations more visible, and eventually more effective.
If you are a founder who is looking to revolutionize an industry, the CRV team and I would love to connect with you.
Originally published at https://medium.com on January 24, 2022.
