CareYaya

In 2022, Neal Shah — a former hedge fund partner in New York — wound down his fund after his wife was diagnosed with cancer, and spent two years as her full-time caregiver. During that time, he discovered that nearby college students studying nursing and pre-med were a more reliable source of care than traditional home-care agencies — but the practice was entirely informal, with no background checks, no training standard, and no insurance. CareYaya was founded to formalize that channel into a platform. The platform itself is completely free: families pay no platform fee, students pay no agency fee, and the $17–20 an hour families pay goes almost entirely to the student. The platform runs on donations and foundation/university partnership funding, including the American Heart Association, Johns Hopkins, and AARP's AgeTech Collaborative. By 2026, more than 50,000 students are registered on the platform (from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Berkeley, and UT Austin), and it has facilitated more than 100,000 care connections; every student passes a background check and video interview before starting. The platform is also expanding into research and new products: a partnership with Duke uses AI to track Alzheimer's progression, a smart-glasses project (worn by seniors) screens for early cognitive decline, and the product line has grown to include an AI phone companion called QuikTok and a VR/neurotech hospice-care project featured on CBS News. Co-founder Gavry Eshet has said the model has so far only been validated within North Carolina — whether it can scale nationally or internationally (with interest already from Canada, Australia, and the UK) remains untested, and open questions remain around continuity of care as students graduate, and around liability under the "non-medical home assistance" classification.