Gubbe is a wellness technology company that aims to revolutionize the elderly care industry by matching seniors with suitable young helpers through subscription.
Its mission is to solve the huge global health problem of an aging society and public health problems.
Founded in 2018 in Finland by Meri-Tuuli Laaksonen and myself, the company has expanded further into Sweden and now the UK.
Subscribers are often relatives of the elderly and purchase home visits from local youth who help with household chores and spend quality time with their loved ones.
What is the idea behind the company?
The idea came when I started looking for a cure for my grandmother’s loneliness and was exploring ways to get someone to help.
I’m incredibly close to my grandmother, but I haven’t had enough time to commit to visiting her and helping her around the house. I was in a position where I wanted to do more, but I just couldn’t.
I had long wondered if there were any activating and preventive services that could help support the family and the elderly, but there was nothing like it on the market.
Many of the seniors we serve have conditions such as dementia or struggle to move independently.
Gubbe’s helpers can take them to the bathroom, cook and feed them, change their sheets, and do other household chores, as well as small chores like going outside.
Our mission from the beginning has been to create the best elderly care service in the world for the benefit of service users and also to give meaningful work to young people.
How has the company evolved in recent years?
Like many relatively new businesses, the pandemic has presented us with several challenges.
It was more of an issue for us because our business is centered around home visits to the elderly, and this has become extremely difficult during the public health crisis.
However, it has made our mission clearer than ever as the well-being of the elderly has become such an important issue and the pandemic has massively increased the demand for our service.
Since our founding in 2018, we have ambitious growth plans and have expanded first to Sweden and now to the UK, which we are very excited about.
We’ve been thrilled with the reception we’ve had in the UK so far and the feedback we’ve gotten from customers is that we’re really helping them solve a big problem.
What can we expect from Gubbe in the future?
It’s a very busy time for us right now as we continue our expansion in the UK and continue to leverage technology to improve our service.
We started with Greater London, but the plan is to expand to cities across the country as quickly as possible.
Another exciting thing for us is that we have created software that provides real-time updates to relatives and we firmly believe that this has the ability to revolutionize elderly care and bring more security to families.
Bringing in new technologies and changing the way users interact with the service is a game changer.
We’re doing the same thing Deliveroo has done with the food industry: revolutionizing the way service is delivered, what service looks like, and responding to diverse customer needs that no one is meeting right now.
The UK elderly care market is ripe for disruption. There is simply no one on the market that offers reliable, personalized home care like this.
Subscribers trust us to provide the best possible service to their loved ones and we take this responsibility incredibly seriously.
