Blueprint Partners, financial advisor to European technology companies, announces the closing of a €10 million financing round for Epoca, a pioneer in home care for the elderly.
Epoca is the publisher of a remote monitoring platform, a medical device, for elderly people with multiple pathologies and operator of this platform with a dedicated medical-care team. Epoca has just closed a financing round of 10 million euros with Mutuelles Impact, Investir&+, Ring Capital, Orange Ventures, the Astorg foundation and health Business Angels who join Makesense and Elzeard, historical investors, who are also participating in this new round. Epoca, whose solution is already proven in Île-de-France and Pays de la Loire, will now be gradually deployed throughout France.
Founded by Élise Cabanes, a geriatrician and emergency physician, and Mariana Fernandes, a nurse in acute geriatric medicine, Epoca aims to enable elderly people to stay at home for as long as possible, in the best conditions, in a safe and reassuring manner for them and their loved ones. This meets the wish of the vast majority of French people to be able to age well at home.
For this, Epoca has developed a solution based on its two areas of expertise:
After 2 years of experimentation with the Regional Health Agency (ARS) of Île-de-France with an elderly population with multiple pathologies, considered to be at risk, the results have largely demonstrated the validity of this hybrid approach:
These results have also convinced the health authorities to implement a very significant Article 51 in record time, still in progress, to experiment with these solutions on more than 4,000 patients in 3 departments of Ile-de-France.
The relevance of its business approach, the human quality of the support, the dedication of its teams – nourished by the meaning found in their commitment and motivated by the daily impact of their actions – have put Epoca in the spotlight among the many healthcare players in the regions.
Epoca has thus quickly become a privileged partner of the community (ARS, Departmental Councils, etc.) and of healthcare operators in the territories (university hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, independent living facilities, SSIAD, CPTS, etc.). Epoca brings them a dual capacity: the capacity to carry out the very specific job of geriatric remote monitoring and the capacity to deploy on a scale across entire territories in record time. Epoca thus meets a very strong expectation and supports healthcare operators, who are increasingly overwhelmed by the demographics of seniors, the increase in the prevalence of pathologies, but also the tension and wear and tear on the professions of caregivers and carers.
This overflow and the increase in the use of unscheduled care also lead to saturation of emergency services, which themselves have no other solution than to send these elderly patients for observation in hospital. However, for people suffering from chronic pathologies / multiple pathologies, decompensations can be much better anticipated by appropriate monitoring, and hospitalizations and care are then avoided.
This is exactly the result of the work of Epoca's 30 employees, including 15 health professionals who offer long-term medical and medico-social care for elderly people with multiple pathologies. This helps to strengthen access to a more fluid health pathway ranging from prevention to care and thus avoiding visits to emergency rooms and/or repeated and avoidable hospitalizations.
The company is today raising 10 million euros from committed investors, mobilized around Epoca's mission: Mutuelles Impact and Investir&+, Ring Capital, Orange Ventures, the Astorg foundation, individual investors and historical investors Makesense and Elzeard.
This operation will allow Epoca to continue its organic development to support more and more patients at home, in independent living residences, in nursing homes or in hospital. In France for the coming semesters but with the preparation of the deployment of these good practices among the 20 million seniors with multiple pathologies at risk that Europe will have by 2040.
Finally, beyond the deployment of the activity in the territories, this operation will enrich Epoca's technological platform to make it more efficient in absorbing time-consuming and administrative tasks. All the quantitative data measured and the annotated and contextualized qualitative information will provide a unique dataset to make rapid progress on improving operational performance. This will make it possible to protect human time even better on critical care tasks: medical decision-making and the relationship with the patient to help them monitor their therapies and their path to recovery.
"We are happy at all levels with this great operation! It brings together strong partners whose complementarity and coherence reinforce Epoca's ambition for a renewed, collaborative and efficient vision of home healthcare for seniors. It will allow Epoca's teams and their field partners to accelerate the deployment throughout France of its unique offer that we want to be accessible to all and adapted to each person. I would like to salute the work of the Epoca and Blueprint Partners teams who supported us throughout our process. By helping us to articulate our development, by taking full ownership of our project and by bringing it with heart to investors, Blueprint was decisive. Present on all aspects of the operation, Blueprint worked tirelessly to syndicate this round with exactly the partners we wanted to have. This gives us the means to develop Epoca to accomplish our mission. Thank you! »
Elise Cabanes
"Supporting Élise, Mariana, Alexandre, Melissa, Thomas and the entire Epoca team was a great joy. Having the chance to help someone who has such an impact on the health of our elders was a wonderful source of motivation. Epoca is a “pure player” with a very specific mission to serve a massive and rapidly growing need over the next 20 years. Its hybrid model, which puts digital technology at the service of humans, and the multiplicity of funding sources on the other hand, forced us to work hard to convince investors. Fortunately, Élise’s extraordinary pugnacity and Epoca’s pragmatic, efficient and scalable model allowed us to go the last mile. I would like to thank Mari Kameyama of Investir&+ who was the first to reconcile all these elements into a strong investment thesis."
Marc Chancerel
