Dele Health Journey - an example of a growing health tech company

Photo: Dele Health

Dele Health Tech was founded in 2011 in Hallingdal, Ål kommune (as iGlobalTracking AS). In our early days, the company worked with senior health, focusing on both public and private players. We looked at the different roles relatives and caregivers can play with seniors ageing in place (living at home) through home healthcare and also with local professional senior living communities. Two main problems we worked with from the earliest days of the company were fall and wander management. In 2018, the company pivoted and has since focused solely on falls amongst older adults.

Based on the years of R&D in the Norwegian market, we introduced our new fall solution to the US market in April 2019 at a privately run senior care community in Florida, where we have been live ever since. We now have 13 clients in the Nordics (Sweden and Norway) and North America (USA and Canada).

DELE has currently 28 employees (21 in the US, 4 in Sweden and 3 in Norway) with a mix of people from 3 different areas; 

1) Tech team from other industries that have gone through a data and digitization revolution, like fintech and e-commerce

2) Senior living expertise and contact network

3) Expertise on aging / gerontology

DELE offers 3 products, run on what we call our Data Fusion Platform; Detect, Predict and Protect. The solution fuses data from different sources, such as fall radars and Electronic Health Records to understand the individual fall risks and suggested protective measures for each individual.

The partner go to market model is the most important scaling strategy for the company, and we have worked for two years on getting access to EHR data from the leading industry players, including the first unicorn within AgeTech, a Canadian company called Point Click Care. Current partner integrations count 17 at this point, with a combination of data partners, installation partners and nurse call systems that handle the hard fall alerts.

DELE built its strategy around the fact that 30% of all data being produced globally today is health related. We differ from other fall tech firms, as the others only focus on already frequent fallers. By entering people's lives earlier, we utilize empirical data intelligence to identify who has a growing fall risk with the aim of protecting our customers against fall #1 and onwards. The name DELE = to share in Norwegian, and symbolizes the company's vision that health related data should be shared amongst tech vendors and their clients so we can ensure this valuable data is fully utilized for the good of all humanity.

The company has raised a total of 135 MNOK so far, with lead investors being Investinor, Northscaler, Altitude Capital, MP Pensjon, Gunnar Evensen, Stratel, Trond Rieber Knudsen, K4 Group, Momentum Partners. It is now aiming to raise its next round, which will be a late Series A/early Series B round from both current shareholders as well as investors outside of Norway, inline with its main growth market, the USA.

With Covid-19, the senior care tech and senior living industries have seen tremendous growth in interest globally. To date, seniors have been an underserved market segment in terms of getting access to new innovations and technology. Now, the big tech firms are moving in, with Amazon leading the way with its launch for seniors ageing in place last October. Several big health tech funds are also seeing opportunities for value creation and positive returns from firms within age-tech. Heavy consolidation activity is expected in the near future within the industry, and we fully expect that DELE will play a part in that journey.

Contribution by
Carine Zeier, Dele Health