NxG Award 2020 - Winner - Max Parmentier
Max Parmentier, 5th Generation Bekaert, Belgium
Founder of “Birdie”
Max is 5th Generation, Bekaert group, Belgium
Project Name: “Birdie”
Year initiated: 2017
Project description: Birdie is an award-winning social venture looking after the elderly. We use digital products, internet-of-things and machine learning to help deliver better, preventative care for our elders to live longer, healthier and happier at home.
https://www.birdie.care/
About Max
Max Parmentier is a member of NextGen and of the 5th generation of Bekaert, the world market and technology leader in steel wire transformation and coatings.
Over the generations, Max’s family has transmitted the values of entrepreneurship, social stewardship and resilience. This has inspired Max throughout his career to undertake new systemic initiatives to drive social change.
He is the co-founder and CEO of Birdie, an agetech startup looking after the elderly. Birdie uses digital products, IoT and machine learning to help deliver better, preventative care for our elders to live healthier and happier at home. Birdie ranks among the best startups in Europe and is B-Corp certified. It aims at radically improving the lives of millions of older adults and at shaping a new kind of corporation that takes responsibility for our communities and our environment.
Previously, Max was the founder and CEO of the world largest global health e-marketplace under the hosting of the Global Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Max has a background in social innovation in startups, public and private sector, including as manager at McKinsey in the sustainability and climate change practice.
Max holds a Master in Management and Engineering from UCL, Belgium, a Master in International Management from CEMS and Master in International Economic Policy from Columbia University in New York.
How does your project provide a solution to a problem or satisfies a specific need?
Society is facing a new climate change : the number of frail older adults will triple in the coming 20 years. Local authorities and health systems are already underfunded to provide decent care. In the UK only, 1.2 million elderly don’t have the necessary support to perform vital tasks, there is a funding gap of £2.5bn to finance social care, 25% of private care professionals are on the brink of bankruptcy and 50% of the 7 million “informal” caregivers (essentially family members) shows sign of depression because caring for their loved one is so tiring. While the care community is truly dedicated, it is dysfunctioning: the care is uncoordinated, generic to any individual and very reactive. This leads to older adults declining rapidly.
At Birdie, we aim at offering a much brighter future to our elders and helping them live longer, healthier and happier in the comfort of their own home. Our ambition - which every team and board member adheres to - is to radically improve the life of one million older adults by 2023. Birdie uses digital products, cutting-edge home connected devices and machine learning to empower the care community to deliver better preventative care: they are better connected, more efficient, deliver higher quality, tailored care. Our solutions cover apps, webapps, motions sensors or telecare services. Thanks to the data that we are collecting and our machine learning algorithms, we can identify clinical issues or risks earlier and address them in time, whether it’s infection, disease, long term condition or risk of fall. This can lead to 50% lower hospital admissions, and 5 to 10 years in healthier condition for an average older adult over 75. It also leads to significant savings for the healthcare and social care services.
How do you create customer value?
In technology, customer value is created by a thought process of identifying painpoints of customers, designing a solution with an MVP (a minimum viable product) to test client appetite, and iterate very rapidly with the MVP to achieve product market fit. Such fit is achieved through metrics such as NPS above 60, clients stating that it would be really painful without the solution and of course clients paying. Typically one would expect growth of 30% monthly for a new solution, with very limited churn at beginning.
How is your project innovative?
Birdie has been rated as one of the most innovative healthtech startups in the UK. I have described before our business model and approach. There is no other company in the world combining so many different solutions within one integrated platform, thereby gathering the largest health and wellbeing dataset on the elderly in the world.
What is the most valuable mistake that you have made, and what did you learn from it?
At some points, we were doing too many things not well enough. We launched too many projects, explored too many new markets with too many new products. We realised none of it was done properly and that each of these initiative would take much longer. I failed at focusing the company on the right path and was stretching it too much. I learned to focus better and do one thing well rather than too many things poorly. The underpinning risk is probably higher, but the execution will be better.
How being from a family business has impacted you as a person, and which influence this has in turn had on your project?
I'm very inspired by the story of my ancestor who launched Bekaert. He was an entrepreneur in his soul. In my family, we have an abnormal number of entrepreneurs (starting with my brothers). We grew up with my grandfather telling us stories on how one person could impact an entire sector. On how freedom of thoughts and actions were powerful. On how we were master of our destiny and life was ready to be reaped. He gave us that comfort to dare and try. Since my childhood, these stories have inspired me to try many new things without fearing to fail, and with the vision and ambition that nothing is impossible. It may sound cheesy, but I truly live by these values;-)