73% of Employees Are Caregivers – and It's Costing Employers

01 /The Concept

Cariloop opens with a striking claim: up to 73% of a company's employees are dealing with caregiving responsibilities that affect their work.

The population in question spans a wide range – parents of young children, employees caring for sick relatives, and those managing aging parents. In all cases, the burden consumes time, mental bandwidth, and emotional energy. And it bleeds into work: focus, hours, and enthusiasm are compromised.

Cariloop provides these employees with a broad package of support: mental wellness resources, specialist consultations, help finding care providers, and legal and financial services. Everything is accessible through an app where users can find information, connect with professionals, submit and receive documents, and reach support.

The app also includes a peer community – a space for caregivers to share advice and support with others in similar situations.

Users aren't left to figure it out alone. Each person has access to dedicated coaches who help build a care plan, answer questions as they arise, and take on tasks that can be delegated.

While individuals can technically subscribe directly, Cariloop's landing page for individual users consists of essentially two prompts: "Want your employer to offer this to you and your colleagues?" and "Are you an HR manager who wants to implement this?"

The core model is B2B. Cariloop sells to companies, which then offer the service as an employee benefit. The pitch to employers is concrete: US companies lose an estimated $44 billion per year to productivity decline, absenteeism, and turnover caused by caregiving-related stress. Cariloop positions itself as the way to recover that cost.

Clients report a 3x return on their investment in the service, with employees collectively recovering more than 300,000 hours of work time that would otherwise have been absorbed by caregiving logistics.

Cariloop has been around for some time, but revenue has quadrupled over the past three years. Existing clients are adding more employees and paying more – net revenue retention currently stands at 120%. Against that backdrop, the company has raised $20M, bringing total funding to $43.1M.

02 /Why It Matters

The statistics behind Cariloop's pitch aren't marketing – the problem is real and large. In 2015, 43.5 million Americans were providing care to a family member. By 2020, that number had risen to 53 million – about 19% of the entire US population. Of those, 61% are employed, and 21% rate their own health as poor.

The trajectory is going one way. In 2020, there were 35 million Americans over 65. By 2060, that number is projected to reach 94.7 million – 2.5 times larger. As a share of the total population, people over 65 will grow from 13.1% in 2010 to 22% by 2050. More elderly people means more caregivers in the workforce, and more drag on productivity.

Because the problem is genuinely large, Cariloop isn't alone.

Wellthy, [covered previously](/review/neozhidannyj-sposob-uderzhat-75-sotrudnikov), built a comparable service sold through employers and has raised $78M.

ianacare, [covered here](/review/kto-pomozhet-tem-kto-pomogaet) in early 2022, is on the same path and has raised $18.1M, including some funding raised after that review.

03 /Opportunities

Demand for these services is growing for two compounding reasons.

The economic picture also intensifies the need: companies are under pressure to do more with fewer people. An employee who is mentally and emotionally absorbed by caregiving can't operate at full productivity – and that gap is getting more expensive to absorb.

And the demographic shift compounds it: the aging population keeps expanding the share of the workforce affected. This isn't a trend that reverses.

This market is unlikely to be winner-take-all. There's no strong network effect in the model – Cariloop, Wellthy, and ianacare can all find customers simultaneously. As the problem grows, the market grows with it, and there's room for more entrants.

The direction worth exploring: building analogous services for the caregiving support market.

The model is relatively straightforward. There's no exotic technology required to get started – the main capability needed is selling to HR teams and benefits administrators. And that's true for any B2B startup. What this space has in addition is a validated need, a demonstrably large market, and organic tailwinds built into demographics. The business case practically writes itself.