Seen Health Nets $22m In Series A Funding To Launch Pace Center, New Operating Model

A senior care tech company aiming to help older adults age at home and in their communities is launching a new effort centered on providing better care for the Asian and Pacific Islander community.

The company, Seen Health, recently raised $22 million in Series A funding to build a new Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) center in Alhambra, California. 8VC led the funding round, with participation from Basis Set, Primetime Partners, Virtue and Astrana Health.

PACE is a service in which older adults – typically people who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid – can visit centers and receive services such as primary care, social services, therapies, nutritional support, personal care, transformation and home care services.

Twin brothers Xing and Yang Su founded Seen Health in 2021. They both have a background at tech companies, such as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and Uber (NYSE: UBER).

The brothers, immigrants from China who were raised by their grandparents, are seeking to provide better care for people belonging to the Asian and Pacific Islander community through its new PACE center, Xing Su told Senior Housing News. The demographic group is one of the fastest-growing in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

Seen Health is designing the PACE center with people of the Asian and Pacific Islander community in mind. For example, the community houses a centrally located living tree, which is a symbol in Chinese culture that signifies life, longevity and prosperity, Su said. The space also incorporates soundproofing padding that is designed to look like mountains, 

With the new funding, Seen Health is also building an operating platform aimed at integrating PACE services to provide more personalized care and centralize PACE services within its operating platform.

Seen Health views PACE as an “incredible vehicle” to reach AAPI older adults and serve them with a “culturally-focused experience” tailoring all aspects of care. That means serving culturally competent foods, providing specific activities to engage with underserved older adults.

“The existing PACE organization today are almost like a one-size-fits-all template but as an immigrant family, I have first-hand knowledge and understanding of the specific needs of this community and it’s quite different than other communities,” Xing Su told Senior Housing News. “They have different beliefs, different customs, different habits that are not necessarily always well served in a one-size-fits-all type of program.”

Seen Health is using an operating system to “orchestrate all aspects of care” by combining various aspects of PACE services and data points to allow organizations to make better decisions in programming and older adult health care delivery. Because PACE service recipients are often dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, there are often specific regulations that PACE providers must follow. But Su sees an opportunity to streamline all aspects of delivering PACE services with the operating platform.

“We want to be able to build that into the tools so that the staff members can focus much more on delivering the care,” Su said. “We see there’s a massive opportunity for us to digitalize the tracking of the end management of operations and we’re looking to significantly decrease the cost of care so that we can eventually really scale this model.”

The tech platform is already operational and Seen Health is marketing to existing PACE organizations nationwide, but Xing Su sees a path for growth as organisations can drive “influence over operations” rather than simply being a tech-vendor in the already crowded space.

“There’s all these smaller details that we will put into the center to make sure that people can feel almost like a home away from home in the center,” Su said. “We want to be a gathering place for the community whereas traditionally, these PACE facilities are generally only accessible to seniors.”

Su believes Seen Health can access future growth opportunities with other PACE centers beyond San Gabriel valley and in other urban markets across the country. Su also sees the Seen Health model as having applications for other underserved ethnic communities in centralizing operations and lowering the barrier to entry in creating culturally-competent services for underserved older adults.

“Our vision was to get to a point where we can enable others, both through technology and through other services, so that we can be a true partner to other folks who want to be the launch of this for their communities,” Su said. “If we can be successful here making this replicable, then we can open ourselves up to partners in a variety of different ways, whether it’s technology-only, technology plus services, or even joint ventures.”

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