Lottie Built a Senior Living Marketplace With Real-Time Bed Availability

01 /The Concept

Searching for a care home typically means contacting six different facilities before finding one with an available bed that fits. Lottie, a UK marketplace for senior living, cut that number to one.

The platform covers both care homes – specialist facilities for residents with age-related medical needs – and retirement villages, where independent older adults live in private cottages or apartments. Users can browse by price, location, type of care, and now, critically, by live availability.

Lottie raised its first £500k in July 2021, then £2.5M in January 2022, followed by £6.1M six months later. Its latest round brings in an additional £16.4M. That fundraising velocity reflects the underlying growth: monthly visitors have quadrupled year-over-year to 500,000, and the platform claims users find suitable placements five times faster than through conventional directories.

The speed advantage is not a UX trick. It comes from a strategic acquisition.

02 /Why It Matters

A year ago Lottie acquired Found, a CRM built specifically for care homes and retirement villages. By the time of the deal, hundreds of UK facilities were already using it. The CRM handles two things: tracking current bed occupancy and forecasting future availability, and managing inbound inquiries from prospective residents and their families.

Integrating that CRM data into the marketplace turned Lottie from a listings directory into a live availability engine. A visitor searching for a memory-care bed can now see which homes have openings now and which expect vacancies in the next three months – rather than firing off six inquiries and waiting for responses.

The demographic pressure behind this is not subtle. In 1950, people over 65 made up just over 10% of the UK population; by 2046 that share is projected to hit 25%. The same curve plays out across the developed world, with the over-65 cohort growing steadily as a share of the total population. More people need care home placements, supply has not kept pace, and the result is a market where friction costs real money for families and real occupancy gaps for providers.

Recent UK analysis found that people are contacting an average of six facilities before finding a placement with suitable conditions. Lottie's integration reduces that to a single search session.

The business model shift is where things get genuinely interesting. Traditional senior-living marketplaces earn a flat fee per inquiry – which, perversely, rewards inefficiency. Lottie, by reducing inquiry volume through better matching, would appear to be cutting its own income. Instead, it layered on two new revenue streams: a monthly CRM subscription starting at £150 per facility, and a percentage-of-tenancy model – taking a share of a resident's ongoing accommodation costs rather than a one-time referral fee. That aligns Lottie's incentives with the best possible outcome for both resident and facility.

03 /Opportunities

Senior living is one specific application of a broader structural shift: the online services marketplace. The market for booking services online reached €62 billion in 2021 and is growing at around 24% annually.

The meaningful opportunity is not just building services marketplaces – it's building marketplaces where real-time availability is native to the product. A [related review](/review/zajti-i-vzletet) covered Scnd, a European startup positioning itself as services marketplace infrastructure; it raised €4M in its first round and attracted comparisons to Shopify for services.

Physical-goods marketplaces solved availability fifteen years ago: you can see live stock levels before clicking buy. Services marketplaces are only now making that transition. Facilities without a CRM are essentially operating like retailers without inventory management – and any marketplace built on top of them is just a catalog, not a true marketplace.

The playbook is replicable in a range of service verticals: medical appointments, home services, logistics capacity. [Nash](/review/marketplejs-kak-chjornyj-jashhik), a real-time delivery marketplace that raised $27.9M, applied the same logic to shipping – e-commerce operators can compare available carrier capacity at the moment of fulfillment rather than guessing ahead of time.

The durable advantage goes to whoever owns the CRM layer. A marketplace that can offer real-time availability because it built or acquired the scheduling infrastructure becomes structurally hard to displace – and can shift from per-lead to per-outcome billing, which is a far better commercial position.