Lottie buys billing veteran CareMaster to point AI at social care's paperwork

Lottie, the London healthtech scaleup backed by Accel and General Catalyst, has acquired CareMaster, a 25-year-old provider of care-billing software, as it tries to automate some of the most stubbornly manual work in running a care business. It is Lottie’s second acquisition in the sector, following its 2022 purchase of the care CRM Found, and the deal terms were not disclosed.

The strategic logic is straightforward even if the technology is still catching up to the ambition. CareMaster, founded by Bob Grimshaw and Colin Rooke, works with nearly 75 care providers across more than 750 UK care home locations, and specialises in billing, payments and credit control — the unglamorous plumbing of care finance. Those customers, and 25 years of accumulated domain knowledge, now move onto Lottie’s Found platform.

From marketplace to the back office

Lottie is not where it started. Founded in 2021 by brothers Will and Chris Donnelly, it began as a consumer marketplace — a way for families to find and compare care homes, pitched as making later-life care “as effortless as reserving a hotel room.” It raised a $21M Series A in 2023 led by Accel, with General Catalyst also backing it, taking total funding to more than £25m.

What it has quietly become is a software company for care operators. The 2022 acquisition of Found gave it a foothold in the providers’ back office, and Lottie says it has since rebuilt that platform “AI-native,” expanding it from a tool used by fewer than 100 care home locations into one it expects to reach nearly 2,500 UK care services by the end of 2026. CareMaster extends that from occupancy and enquiries into the harder territory of getting paid.

Where the AI actually is

It is worth being precise about the AI, because the framing runs ahead of the product. The concrete news here is an acquisition — of customers, of a long-established billing product, and of decades of specialist know-how. The AI is largely forward-looking: Lottie says credit control is the first process it plans to automate, before extending across the wider journey “from a family’s first enquiry about care through to a provider getting paid.”

That is a sensible place to aim. Chasing late payments across a fragmented sector of small operators, each with their own quirks, is exactly the kind of multi-step, rules-heavy admin that AI agents are increasingly being pointed at — and exactly the kind of task where a generic model fails and 25 years of billing-specific knowledge earns its keep. Owning that domain expertise is arguably the point of the deal; the automation is the bet it enables.

Why the admin matters

The stakes are real because the sector is under strain. Adult social care in England carries around 96,000 vacancies — a shortage roughly three times the wider economy’s rate — and providers and councils have been squeezed by rising costs for years. In that context, time lost to manual paperwork is not a productivity abstraction; it is time not spent on care. Lottie’s framing — that cutting admin frees staff to focus on people — lands harder here than the same line would in most industries.

Lottie says the combined Found and CareMaster could support £3bn in annual care invoicing by the first half of 2027, up from more than £1bn today. Those are company projections rather than results, and the usual caveat applies: consolidating billing software and genuinely automating it with AI are two different achievements, and this deal so far delivers the first.

The bigger pattern

Lottie’s move fits a broader UK theme we keep returning to: the most practical AI in Britain right now is often aimed at unglamorous back-office work rather than frontier research. InTouchNow is putting AI voice agents on GP surgery phone lines; the NHS’s own rollout is as much about administrative load as clinical breakthroughs. Applying AI to the paperwork of a strained public-facing sector is less eye-catching than a new model, but if it works, the impact is tangible — and the market is enormous.

For now, Lottie has bought itself a deeper position in care finance and a clear target for its automation. Whether the AI delivers on billing the way the marketing promises is the thing to watch into 2027. We will track it on Lottie’s profile as it develops.