Tag: Top Entrepreneur Finalist

Wells, 55, founded Serenity Engage in 2019 following more than 20 years in software marketing. “This is my first startup,” she says. “I’m really proud I’m a female founder starting a company over the age of 50.”

The idea for the company originated when her mother was in memory care and her father was in assisted living about a decade ago. “What people don’t know is that when you move someone into a senior care facility, everyone thinks it’s handled — ‘I don’t have to do anything,'” says Wells. “I struggled to get the people who were caring for my mom and dad to communicate with me.”

Wells subsequently set out to solve the problem. R&D included countless interviews and living with her mother for nine days. “I put my heart and soul in connecting everyone surrounding our older adults to communicate and collaborate about their care,” she says. “My goal is to solve this problem for everybody coming after me, because senior care should not be hard.”

First deployed in 2019, the company’s HIPAA-compliant platform has saved its users an average of three to five hours a week per staff member. One hospice provider estimates it saves the business more than $50,000 a year. “It stops the phone from ringing and having upset family members calling,” Wells says.

As of early 2022, Serenity had 4,000 users after doubling to 10 employees the year before, including Wells’ husband and top developer, Rob Pinna. It has closed on two pre-seed rounds of $1.5 million and is currently pursuing a seed round. Serenity Engage is also launching Alexa-enabled technology to target a broader market of independent living this year.

“Everybody wants to give you their opinion,” Wells says. “You should take it, you should listen — especially if you’re a new entrepreneur, listen, soak it up — but you have to make your own decisions. There is no perfect road map
for this.”

 

Serenity Engage
Serenity is a HIPAA-compliant communication platform. For staff. For families. For providers. Or for all. Serenity believes giving everyone the same information at the same time on a single platform has proven to create continuity of care.

 

 

 

 

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF COLORADOBIZ MAGAZINE’S FEATURE FOR TOP ENTREPRENEUR FINALISTS

After starting and selling Fashiolista, an early-moving social network in his native Netherlands, Schellenbach, 35, brought his next startup, Stream, to Techstars in New York in 2016 and subsequently moved the headquarters to Boulder, while maintaining an office in Amsterdam.

The company began providing a platform for online activity feeds to such customers as Soundcloud, but truly took off during the pandemic with infrastructure for live chats. “We started providing chat for education, we started providing chat for health care and telemedicine,” Schellenbach says. “Live events and concerts all moved online. Some of our traditional customers struggled, but then this whole new segment picked up online and it really accelerated our growth.”

The chat products, released in 2019, grew by a whopping 625 percent in 2020 and 100 percent in 2021. Now 150 employees after hiring 60 in 2021, Stream has closed on $58 million in venture capital to date, about 90 percent of it since the introduction of chat products.

Schellenbach says he waited to pursue funding until the time was right. “You need to understand when to accelerate and when not to,” he says. “We waited until the numbers looked good before we poured, so to speak, oil on the fire.”

With the funding in place, the company plans to hire another 100 employees in 2022, and its locations in the U.S. and Europe have proven helpful in that regard. “It turns out a lot of people would like to move to Amsterdam or Colorado,” Schellenbach laughs.

 

Stream
From Amsterdam to Boulder and Techstars in-between, Stream has raised over $58.25 million to build Chat Messaging & Activity Feed infrastructure, with best-in-class support.

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF COLORADOBIZ MAGAZINE’S FEATURE FOR TOP ENTREPRENEUR FINALISTS