Care home AI valuation engine

Aim

To give every family the data and clarity they need to choose the right care home for loved ones — without bias, jargon, or guesswork.

The Moment That Started Everything

Every day in the UK, thousands of families face one of the most consequential decisions of their lives — where their elderly parent, grandparent, or loved one will spend what may be their final years. And almost every single one of them makes that decision in the same way.

They Google “care homes near me.” They look at a few websites with stock photos of smiling elderly people and manicured gardens. They try to decode a CQC inspection report written in bureaucratic language they’ve never encountered before. They ask a friend who went through it two years ago and whose recommendation may be completely out of date. And then, usually within 72 hours because a hospital has told them their relative needs to be discharged, they make a guess.

A guess that will cost them £40,000 to £60,000 a year.

A guess that will define the quality of life — and sometimes the length of life — of someone they love.

That is the problem ClearCare was built to solve.

What We Found When We Looked at the Data

When we began pulling data from the CQC — the Care Quality Commission, the independent regulator of every care home in England — what we found was striking.

Approximately 20% of registered care homes in England are rated either Requires Improvement or Inadequate at any given time. But that headline figure barely scratches the surface of the real picture.

A care home can be rated Good overall while being rated Requires Improvement in the Safe domain — the domain that covers whether residents are protected from abuse, neglect, and avoidable harm. A home can have a current Good rating that it received 30 months ago, with conditions on the ground having changed dramatically since then. A home can be rated Outstanding while its parent company quietly accumulates County Court Judgements at Companies House. A home can change ownership entirely and have a completely unknown track record under new management — and none of that will show up on the comparison sites families actually use to make their decision.

The comparison sites themselves are part of the problem. The largest and most-used care home directories in the UK charge care homes for premium listings. The homes that appear at the top of the results page are not the best homes — they are the homes that paid the most to appear there. The incentive structure is completely inverted. The buyer thinks they are getting objective guidance. They are getting a paid advertisement.

ClearCare was built to be structurally different. We have zero commercial relationships with any care home. We receive no referral fees, no listing fees, no payments from providers. Our only customer is the family. Our only incentive is to give them the most accurate, honest, objective analysis we can produce.

The Data Nobody Was Using

What makes ClearCare possible is that the data has always existed. It has always been public. It has always been free.

The CQC publishes not just overall ratings but granular domain scores — Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, and Well-led — for every registered care home in England. It publishes full inspection reports. It publishes enforcement actions, warning notices, requirement notices, and conditions placed on registrations. It publishes the complete rating history of every home going back years.

Companies House publishes the filed accounts, ownership structure, director histories, and registered charges of every care home operating company in the UK. The financial health of a care home operator — whether they are accumulating debt, whether their accounts show warning signs, whether they have multiple County Court Judgements — is all right there, publicly available, updated regularly, accessible via a free API under the Open Government Licence.

NHS and local authority contract data reveals which homes accept council-funded residents alongside self-funders — a strong indicator of financial stability and operational confidence.

All of this data exists. None of it has ever been properly organised, synthesised, and explained in plain English to the families who desperately need it. That is the gap ClearCare fills.

How ClearCare Works

A family comes to ClearCare in crisis — or, increasingly, planning ahead before the crisis hits. They spend ten minutes telling us what they need: where they are, what type of care their loved one requires, what their budget is, what matters most to them. Quality above all else. Proximity to family. A dementia specialist unit. Outdoor space. Financial stability. They tell us their priorities and we listen.

Our AI then processes every care home within their search area against the full stack of public data — CQC ratings, domain scores, inspection history and trajectory, enforcement actions, Companies House financial health signals, ownership changes, bed numbers, registration dates, staffing notifications. It identifies red flags that families would never find on their own. It surfaces green flags that comparison sites never show. And it produces a personalised shortlist in plain English — not a list of ratings, but a genuine explanation of what each home’s data actually means for this specific family and their specific needs.

The home at the top of the shortlist is not the home that paid to be there. It is the home that the data says is the best fit for that family. Full stop.

The Business Model

ClearCare operates across two parallel revenue channels that reinforce each other.

The first is direct to consumer. Families pay a one-off fee — £149 for the Essential report, £299 for the Standard, £499 for the Comprehensive which includes a 30-minute call with a ClearCare adviser — to receive their personalised report. The pricing is deliberately set at a fraction of one week’s care fees. A family spending £1,000 a week on care that pays £299 to make the best possible choice is making an obviously rational decision. The emotional urgency of the situation means conversion rates are significantly higher than typical SaaS products.

The second channel is B2B, and it is where the most significant recurring revenue lives. NHS hospital discharge teams are responsible for placing patients into care homes when they are discharged — and they have exactly the same information problem that families have, at industrial scale. A hospital social worker managing dozens of discharges simultaneously has no time to read 40-page CQC reports for every home they consider. ClearCare’s B2B portal gives NHS trust discharge teams instant, structured access to the same analysis, at a price — £5,000 to £20,000 per trust per year — that is trivial relative to the cost of a single preventable readmission.

There are 215 NHS trusts in England. There are 152 upper-tier local authorities each with adult social care placement responsibilities. There are approximately 3,000 specialist care fee financial advisers who talk to families at exactly the right moment in their planning journey. Each of these represents a distribution channel that reaches ClearCare’s target customer at the moment of maximum need, with implied endorsement from a trusted professional.

Beyond these core channels, ClearCare has identified a third revenue stream that is unique to its position in the market. Care home operators themselves — the 17,000 registered homes — need to understand how they appear in ClearCare’s analysis and what they can do to improve their score. A subscription product for care home operators, giving them access to their own ClearCare profile and competitive benchmarking, generates revenue from the supply side of the market while creating a natural incentive for care homes to improve the quality signals that ClearCare measures. Everyone wins — operators improve, data gets richer, families get better choices.

The Social Impact

ClearCare is unusual among technology startups in that its social impact is as significant as its commercial opportunity — and the two are inseparable.

Poor care home selection has direct, measurable consequences for human lives. A family that places their relative in a home that subsequently closes due to financial failure must put their loved one through the trauma of an emergency move — deeply destabilising for someone with dementia, and devastating for the family. A family that chooses a home with high staff turnover without understanding what that means is unknowingly choosing an environment where their relative will never see a familiar face. A family that misses the financial warning signs at Companies House may find their relative’s home shuttered within a year with days of notice.

ClearCare prevents these outcomes. Not because it has any magic insight that doesn’t exist elsewhere, but because it takes the data that already exists, organises it, and explains it to the people who need it — in the 72 hours they have to make their decision.

The NHS readmission case is perhaps the most financially compelling expression of the social impact. Poor care home placements are a significant driver of hospital readmissions — when a home cannot meet a resident’s care needs, they end up back in an A&E department. Every prevented readmission saves the NHS approximately £2,500. If ClearCare’s NHS trust partnerships improve placement quality enough to prevent even a handful of readmissions per trust per year, the product pays for itself many times over while freeing up beds in hospitals that are chronically overcrowded.

Why Now

Three things have converged in 2025 and 2026 to make ClearCare possible in a way it simply was not before.

The first is data accessibility. The CQC launched a new API strategy in 2024 making granular inspection data more programmatically accessible than at any point in the organisation’s history. Companies House launched its new developer API in 2023. The technical barrier to building ClearCare has collapsed.

The second is AI capability. Large language models now make it possible to translate dense, bureaucratic CQC inspection language into clear, personalised plain English at scale and at a cost per report that makes the business model viable. Explaining what “the provider had not ensured that the principles of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 were consistently applied” means for a family choosing a dementia care home — and doing that automatically, accurately, and affordably — simply was not possible before 2024.

The third is market pressure. The UK adult social care system is experiencing record care home closures. The number of homes rated Requires Improvement or Inadequate has not fallen meaningfully in years. The population is ageing faster than care capacity is growing. The pressure on families to make good decisions has never been higher — and the consequences of bad decisions have never been more severe.

Where We Are Going

ClearCare launches in 2026 in England, with the US market — where Medicare and CMS data provides an equally rich public data infrastructure — running in parallel from day one.

Year Two brings expansion into adjacent care settings: home care agencies, learning disability residential homes, and in the US, the largely unregulated assisted living sector. Each of these markets has the same structural problem — families making high-stakes decisions with poor data — and the same solution applies.

Year Three transforms ClearCare from a report business into a data intelligence business. The accumulated dataset — family reviews, placement outcomes, financial trajectories, rating changes — becomes a proprietary asset with licensing value to insurance companies underwriting care fees products, to property developers building retirement communities, and to the government bodies responsible for regulating and funding the social care system.

The long-term vision is straightforward: ClearCare becomes the definitive independent data layer for the global care home market. The Bloomberg Terminal for one of the most important and most neglected consumer decisions in the world. Not because the founders have a particular passion for regulatory data or care home inspection methodology, but because there is a very large number of families who are making one of the most important decisions of their lives in conditions of near-total information poverty — and that is a problem that has a solution, and the solution is ClearCare.

ClearCare. Find the right care home. With confidence.

This project closed unsuccessfully on 5th June 2026