Social impact
Homage is not Tee’s first foray into the world of start-ups, but it is definitely the one closest to her heart. She did not immediately connect the idea of Homage to her nanny — not at first — but she always knew she wanted to grow a business that would make a social impact.
“I knew I wanted to start a company [when I came home to Singapore],” she says,” And I was very driven to create a company that had social impact, in particular, building a company to enable women to get access to more income opportunities. I was looking at first to support foreign domestic workers, perhaps education or helping women to train in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
An entrepreneur and a Computer Science degree graduate, Tee cut her teeth as a technology consultant with Accenture in the US, and then later as co-founder of Rocketrip, a travel startup incentivising business travel the same way as personal travel.
Her memory of her nanny stuck with her, through it all; and when several of her family members had difficulties finding the care they needed for their conditions, Homage was born in 2016.
“A few things happened sort of all at once. I connected with a number of people — many who have become my mentors since then — who were going through tough caregiving experiences. Sadly, my uncle suffered a stroke, and at the same time, my aunt also suffered from advanced and aggressive Alzheimer’s,” says Tee. “What struck me most was that our family was made up of highly-qualified doctors — elite doctors in elite hospitals — but they also struggled to cope and deal with caregiving.”
This led to Tee taking a much harder look at this gap in the market, and she realised there were a number of problems.
First, there is a lack of awareness of the challenges of long-term caregiving, even among healthcare professionals themselves. “How was it that we were so ill-equipped to deal with this? That’s when I realised it is a lack of knowledge on how to deal with longterm caregiving,” says Tee.
Accessibility was another hurdle. For Tee personally, the search for suitable caregivers and to match them to the individual needs of her family members was difficult and required quite a lot of legwork. Her own rather frustrating search led her to think about a platform that would be tech-driven and solve this problem.
“I thought, why not do something that would mobilise caregivers? My own experiences trying to look for suitable caregiving made me realise the pain points. There was very little technology utilised in this area that would make the process better and easier,” she says.
Homage uses technology to power a match between caregiver and care recipient, tracking over 80 different data points to form a “care profile”, effectively curating the most suitable caregiver for the recipient based on need.
“It’s a deep realisation that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Caregiving truly needs to be personalised. For example, the best caregiver for my auntie will not be the best caregiver for my uncle,” she says. “The problem is you cannot just ‘throw anyone over the fence’ (to be a caregiver). There needs to be a match of competency and ability. Each care recipient’s needs must be triaged and assessed, and this needs to translate into the care they receive.”