Last week we announced our £3 million funding round, led by investor Oakglen. The investment will support CareLineLive’s continued expansion – including into Ireland and Australia – and further our mission to enhance our product and continue providing excellent service to an ever-increasing customer base. Missed the announcement? You can check it out here. The news enjoyed extensive media coverage including in UK Tech News.
Here we speak to Nick Crawford, Group Co-CEO at Oakglen, about the company’s reasons for investing in CareLineLive and the opportunities for the future of the home care market. Over to Nick!
Tell us about Oakglen. What type of companies do you invest in?
Headquartered in Jersey with offices in London and the US, Oakglen is a group of investment and operating companies with interests across the UK, Channel Islands, Europe and North America. Our four key focus areas are in the real estate, private equity, corporate and fund services, and wealth management sectors.
We seek to build, grow and operate best-in-class businesses to generate sustained value accretion over time. Within our private equity business, we have a long track record of providing growth capital to companies in the technology sector, in particular B2B SaaS businesses.
What are your key reasons for investing in CareLineLive?
We first met Josh in September last year and it became clear over a few initial meetings that CareLineLive is a business that meets several of the criteria we look at when assessing potential investment opportunities.
We like to invest in businesses with a strong management team and a proven product that is already successfully running with multiple customers, and where those businesses are operating in a space with a large and ideally growing addressable market. This means that our capital is primarily required to enhance the product and to support increased resourcing to facilitate higher growth.
CareLineLive can be viewed as ‘tech for good’, is this something that is important to Oakglen?
We are a privately owned company and one of our core objectives is to deliver sustained value accretion over a long period of time, rather than over a shorter, pre-determined investment period.
In our view, this objective requires us to think about sustainability at each step in the investment process, whether thinking about carbon reduction in our property development business, or the societal impact of our portfolio companies. CareLineLive undoubtedly seeks to apply technology to deliver efficiencies in a sector with very significant resourcing challenges both in the immediate term, but in the long term also given the demographic dynamics in play. We are pleased that our support can lead to CareLineLive doing this at greater scale.
What market opportunities do you see for CareLineLive?
We think CareLineLive can continue its strong growth by adding more customers that are similar to its existing customers, given the quality of its product and the continued digitisation within the sector. Over and above this, there are opportunities to grow internationally, especially given the business already has customers in Ireland and Australia, and by building on its existing footprint with the NHS.
It seems to me that increased levels of domiciliary care provision by NHS Trusts is going to be one way in which trusts can help alleviate the pressure on hospital beds. To deliver that care at scale is likely to require technology solutions like CareLineLive.
CareLineLive is already helping Mid and South Essex NHS Trust to do this, and is well positioned to do more in this space.
How will you support CareLineLive in achieving its strategic plan?
I would describe OakGlen as an operationally-focused investor. We tend to be the largest – if not one of the largest – non-founder shareholders in the companies that we invest in.
We then work closely with the management team to support them in delivering their objectives. This happens in several different ways but can include board level strategic input, providing financial or legal expertise, supporting investee companies through M&A, further capital raising or international growth.
To find out more about OakGlen, visit its website here.