Caring.com Gets $6 Million To Help With Your Parents’ Elder Years
Nick Gonzalez
11 comments »
Caring.com, a website community about elderly care, just announced a $6 million Series A round of financing from DCM and Split Rock Partners. It’s yet another one of the subject-specific knowledge communities to pop up over the last year.
The site, as you can guess, is about caring for your parents in their “Golden Years”. It provides articles about dealing with your parent’s healthcare, financial, legal, housing, and life issues written by professionals or other users. It seems like a more smartly age-related service than Eons social network for the over 50.
Details on the site are sparse, as the site is only now opening its beta. However, it will likely have the usual forum features and social networking profiles.
The team shouldn’t have too much trouble setting up the site since the founders, Jim Scott and Steve Fram spent eight years at BabyCenter, another community site targeting raising children. Sites like Caring.com seem to have a simple formula, find an underserved vertical, put up a community driven content management system, get some editors, and own the Google search results. Most of these sites are taking on specific verticals, but Wikia is spreading horizontally, using mediawiki as the CMS.
Nick,
Using the word “awkward” and putting Golden Years in quotes almost makes your post seem sarcastic.
As someone who helps older people manage their health problems almost every single day, I can tell you that the kind of unique stresses that the aging process puts on an entire family can be overwhelming.
Whether its a loved one with Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, or even chronic progressive conditions like COPD or congestive heart failure, caring for people with these kinds of conditions are hard. And even harder, sometimes, if its your mother or father, while you’re still trying to keep down a normal job, a family, and a life.
Caregiver “burnout” is a very real phenomenon, and something that I think every single one of us will probably get a taste of as our own parents age.
Usually I have no problems running my snarky opinion all over Web2.0 sites, but I tend to avoid ones that are trying to serve vulnerable individuals or those trying to help vulrnerable individuals.
I mean, surely you would too, right?
Cheers,
Dr. Tony Hung
Deep Jive Interests.
Clarified
How “old” and “akward” are you Nicky?
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Fake Steve,
I’m sure you hear this all the time, but you…are.. hi-LAR-ious. I hope you’ve been driving a lot of traffic to your site. Best of luck with it!!
Cheers.
Appreciated
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Caring.com is actually aimed at me. Not all “crunchers” are 20-something, but I hope not to need something like caring.com for a long time.
My company, CarePilot.com, launched back in April. For whatever reason, the folks at TechCrunch chose not to post about us. Appears that Care.com will be offering a competitive service.
David Restrepo
Founder of CarePilot.com
Actually …it looks like CarePilot is a site dedicated to connecting patients and providers. A similar resource to Medicare’s Nursing Home Compare and Home Health Compare. Caring.com doesn’t appear to be “healthcare industry” driven - it’s more of a site that will give information and resources to those caring for their parents. Check out the content - it’s not comparative to CarePilot.
Hi everyone,
I launched http://www.strengthforcaring.com at Johnson & Johnson 18 months ago (funny, BabyCenter is a J&J company and I knew Steve Fram and Jim Scott
). If you are caring for loved one (of any age) I encourage you to check it out. I am an intrapreneur and not an entrepreneur so I certainly didn’t get $6.0 million to build it 
but it is built with great love by me and one other person. We have great message boards too, and the site does not promote J&J products at all. Best wishes to all of you! Nancy