Anvayaa founder Prashanth Reddy on his elder care start-up, goals & challenges

Hyderabad: Anvayaa Kin Care, India’s leading, Artificial-Intelligence (AI) and IoT-enabled holistic and personalised senior care platform, won in the “Best Product-Established Category” at the Hyderabad Software Enterprises Association (HYSEA) Awards for its innovation in at-home dementia care and IoT-based proactive smart emergency response solutions.

Telangana IT minister K.T. Rama Rao presided over the HYSEA awards ceremony, which was attended by guests of honour Jayesh Ranjan, principal secretary for IT and industries, Telangana; Debashis Chatterjee, CEO and managing director, LTI Mindtree; B.V.R. Mohan Reddy, founder-chairman, CYIENT; and the HYSEA management.

Anvayaa is an elder tech start-up founded in 2016 by Prashanth Reddy and Deepika Reddy with a vision to provide personalised tech-enabled senior care. It offers one-stop elder care services like health care assistance, daily care services, leisure care, payment care, emergency care, and more. Customised care plans for senior citizens are available on a subscription-based model. Since its launch, Anvayaa has provided eldercare support to over 10,000 families, is available in more than 30 cities, and provides emergencies assistance in over 500 pin codes. It aims to serve over one lakh families in the next two years and be the leader in delivering predictable elder care services at home.

Here is what Mr. Prashanth Reddy had to say about his company and core values in a conversation with NewsMeter:

NewsMeter: What is Anvayaa Kin Care all about?

Prashanth Reddy: Anvayaa is a Sanskrit word that means ‘Family’. The motto of our company is to make senior citizens believe that we are their family, especially when they have no one to take care of them. Anvayaa Kin Care is a one-stop solution for all elderly care needs. It is a 360° technology that is built to personalise a platform for senior care. We take care of every need, right from emergencies to daily walks. It caters to all needs such as health, daily needs, and such.

NM: How did it feel winning the honors of “Best product-established category”?

Prashanth Reddy: I think that every award that we win puts us in a more responsible position to ensure that we not only keep up the work that we do but also get better at it. It makes us want to deliver and excel at the expectations of our clients and the community. We feel recognised but with the added pressure of getting better at what we are doing.

NM: What are the core values of the company?

Prashanth Reddy: To put it very simply, I keep telling my employees to follow ‘HEPT’, which stands for Honesty, Empathy, Patience, and Transparency. We aim to deliver proactive services.

NM: Can you tell us more about the Anvayaa Dementia Care Plan?

Prashanth Reddy: This is another important milestone for our company. We launched the Anvayaa Dementia Plan six months ago. Everyone talks about finding ways to take care of dementia but on the ground, no one is doing anything about it. We started our research a couple of years ago and decided to go about a non-medical intervention in the comfort of their own homes. We worked with internal psychologists and neurologists and came up with an idea to ensure that their cognitive and physical well-being is looked after which will help in slowing down the progression of dementia and increase their quality of life.

NM: How did you come up with this start-up idea?

Prashanth Reddy: It is based on my own personal experience. I am the only child of my parents. I used to live in Canada, but I left my Green Card and moved to India to live with my parents. After coming here, I noticed that caring for the elderly was a more common issue than I realised and that is what inspired me to come up with this start-up idea to act as a helping hand to senior citizens in need. I took a plunge and started my research by interviewing about 400 families in Hyderabad. Health wasn’t the only challenge the elderly faced, there were many other day-to-day challenges as well and we decided that Anvayaa would be the one-stop solution to all those problems.