With the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, it is indeed hard to care for the elderly and children for the entire day. But it is indeed difficult to leave them in the care of people without any supervision. Realizing this and experiencing all those feelings firsthand, Devika Wood co-founded ‘Vida’, a London based homecare company in June 2016 along with Naushard Jabir.
Coming to the backstory of Vida, Wood herself lived with her grandmother, who had dementia and epilepsy. Over a course of 12 years, 150 different carers were appointed to look after her grandmother. The constant switching and communication problems led to her grandmother overusing anti-psychotic drugs which finally led to schizophrenia and she was institutionalized at the age of 91. Witnessing all of this as a child, Wood had a strong desire to find a solution to this and after meeting up with Naushard Jabir, both of them conceived Vida together.
Devika was formerly a breast cancer research scientist and health policy advisor. Devika started working for Google at 18 and then pursued Human Biology at King’s College, London. Wood gained a post as a breast cancer research scientist at Imperial College London while completing a master’s degree in Public Health. Later, she worked at businesses like Babylon and Healthcare Australia.
Devika’s background knowledge of life sciences and Jabir’s expertise in technology paved way to ‘Vida’ eventually. The reason Vida stands different from the rest is because of their tactful use of technology that enables them to automate the allocation of care packages using a proprietary algorithm that matches the most appropriate carer to the client using a variety of specified requirements.
“Over the year, we have seen such a vast improvement in our care delivery; our staff at Vida are finding their day-to-day jobs less burdened by admin and they can focus on actually caring for the client and the client experience. This is true innovation—seeing the results first hand on the clients and carers” says Devika.
Devika has been featured in Forbes’ 30 under 30 list and also stands as the Top 10 women changing the world by Glamour Magazine. She is also part of the Mayor of London’s ‘Female Founders Mission’ and is helping pioneer the future for women in technology.
Vida, found a £1m in Seed funding in a round led by Hambro Perks. The company also garnered support from investors including Barnaby Cardwell, of Cardwell Technologies, Grima Ventures and a series of undisclosed high-net worth angel investors. The funds, which total into a £1.4m, will be utilized efficiently to develop Vida’s technology platform.
“This funding allows us to continue developing and deploying the ground-breaking technology that makes Vida so unique.Now that our unique matching algorithm is fully functioning, it means were are seeing many successful matches all over London and now we’re excited to expand to East and West Sussex” says Jabir.
“We are constantly surrounded by statistics of inequality—gender pay gap, inequality in investing, 2% of CEOs being women—often the negativity can fuel women to believe it is not achievable. Therefore, if more women in leadership positions and women who have broken through barriers and challenges are championed, we can change the norm and spark the next generation of successful leading women!” says Devika on the role of women in the business world.
As for the future, the co-founders are in plans to open a office in Brighton and Hove as there were considerable number of requests from that area and the team tends to have a local support staff on the ground in that region.
