Canada is facing a caregiving crunch. By 2030, one in four Canadians will be over the age of 65, swelling demand on families, healthcare systems and caregivers.

With the global wellness market reaching $1.8 trillion and healthy aging identified as a major driver of growth, companies like Waterloo’s Elderella are stepping up to meet the growing need for aging-care innovation.

The caregiver as the overlooked user

Caregiving is no longer just a personal challenge; it’s become a logistical and operational burden that technology has largely overlooked. Families spend countless hours coordinating appointments, managing medications and navigating complex systems, often with little support.

For Elderella founders Jacqui Murphy and Mike Kirkup, the inspiration and the opportunity were clear.

“My parents are getting older. There's also extended family that's getting older, and they've started to encounter different things in their lives,” Murphy said. “Providing the actual care itself can be wonderful, but the stuff around the care is a lot of administration and extra tasks that are really unnecessary.”

Kirkup, who had just exited his previous startup, approached the same problem from a market perspective.

“Headline after headline after headline is, ‘senior gets scammed’. It’s crazy,” he said. “And then, you start doing market research, and there's a whole bunch of seniors, and they're all having challenges. So I came at it from a different direction.”

They realized that it’s the caregiver — not the elder or the institution — who is the overlooked user.

“The reality is, the crazy part of what we're trying to do is not solving elder care, because there are a lot of companies that are out there trying to do that,” Kirkup explained. “We're trying to do it for the caregiver in a B2C model, and very few people are trying that.”

AI-native from the ground up

Elderella isn’t just another app. It’s AI-native, designed to streamline both product development and operational workflows. Kirkup points to an early internal tool that’s supported their efforts.

“I spent a morning building a tool. It does a competitive analysis of competitors’ websites against our strategy, and then gives us a battle card for each one,” he said. “Five minutes of reading, and I know everything I need. That’s AI-native.”

The platform leverages AI to help caregivers manage tasks, generate care plans, and access just-in-time information.

“Knowledge is power,” Murphy said. “Just one little nugget of information that is shared is incredibly valuable and unlocks an entire opportunity for [the caregiver] in terms of their caregiving journey.”

Reducing the invisible load

Caregiving can feel isolating. Families often struggle quietly, hesitant to ask for help or unsure where to turn.

“How do you build a product that doesn’t add burden? That celebrates the caregiver?” Murphy said. “Because you’re not invisible, you shouldn’t be invisible. This work that you’re doing is so incredibly important.”

By designing tools that integrate care, community, and knowledge, Elderella aims to give caregivers visibility, guidance, and support, a level of infrastructure already available to parents of young children but often absent in elder care.

A rising market for founders and investors

For investors, the “silver tsunami” represents a rare convergence of timing, scale, and technology. And as AI accelerates, the ability to rapidly prototype and deliver solutions is unprecedented.

“We need everybody to lean in in terms of how we’re going to figure this out. We are in big trouble if we don’t all start thinking about this and acting on it,” Murphy said.

CareTech is beginning to attract attention from venture capital. B2C platforms like Elderella, powered by AI and serving caregivers directly, are emerging as a new category of investment, bridging real-world need with scalable technology.

As Canada braces for a $1-trillion caregiving crunch, Murphy and Kirkup are building an AI-native tool they hope families will be able to rely on.

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