How Jamie Gong Is Disrupting Senior Care As A Female Founder

Senior care is an industry built on the labor of women. Around 81% of all caregivers for older adults and nearly 90% of Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) in the U.S. are female.

Yet, leadership positions and decision-making roles in healthcare, especially in home care and senior services, remain largely occupied by men. Despite being driven by female labor and emotional intelligence, innovation in senior care has been slow, funding opportunities for women founders remain scarce, and female entrepreneurs in healthcare tech often face skepticism when pitching bold ideas.

Jamie Gong is a young, female entrepreneur with a background in strategy consulting, private equity and brand building who is using technology to challenge the status quo and build a more equitable, effective, and sustainable model for senior home care.

Jamie saw the systemic issues in senior care first-hand while looking after her sick grandmother, from families stuck on long waitlists to caregivers lacking control over their wages and schedules. Determined to change this, Jamie co-founded Care Hero, a platform that connects families directly with qualified caregivers, making care more affordable while giving caregivers the flexibility and financial stability they deserve.

Here’s a closer look at how Jamie Gong is building a better system for seniors, families, and caregivers alike.

Witnessing The Inefficiencies Of Senior Care

Jamie’s drive to improve senior care comes from a deeply personal place. She grew up watching her grandmother dedicate her life to caring for others — raising three children, helping with her grandkids, and supporting her husband through illness.

When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she refused to move into a nursing home, leaving Jamie’s mother as her primary caregiver.

This experience showed Jamie how exhausting and overwhelming caregiving could be — not just emotionally but logistically: “the stressful experience of taking care of an aging loved one made me think about the opportunities in senior care — an often neglected space for young entrepreneurs due to the ‘unsexy’ nature of its businesses.”

Determined to find a way she could improve the senior care industry, Jamie dug deeper into the business model while earning her MBA. After conducting over 200 interviews with families, caregivers, and industry experts, she uncovered a system with many inefficiencies that was failing both families and caregivers.

She found that traditional home care agencies charged steep fees that many families couldn’t afford and also took significant cuts from caregivers’ wages while fully operating their schedules, offering little job security and increasing the likelihood of burnout. The result is a high caregiver turnover rate, leaving as many as 800,000 older Americans on lengthy waiting lists for essential care.

Inspired by her grandmother’s resilience and the stories of caregivers she met, Jamie set out to build a better model — one that valued both the families seeking care and the caregivers providing it.

Her Background As A Female Founder

When Jamie first set out to launch a healthcare tech company, she knew it wouldn’t be easy. Women-led tech startups historically receive less than 3% of venture capital funding, and while women make up 81% of the senior care workforce, they hold just 25% of all executive roles.

But Jamie was no stranger to overcoming these obstacles.

Earlier in her career, she was one of the few women on the private equity investment team at a global-leading private equity fund, helping deploy over hundreds of millions in investment deals across the Asia-Pacific region. She has also proven her entrepreneurial skills by growing a direct-to-consumer frozen food brand from ground up to $5 million in sales within 18 months while leading a 35-person team. These experiences gave her the confidence to push forward despite investor skepticism, participating in a number of top accelerators

These resources allowed her to build a platform that not only improves access to senior care but also reflects the needs of the women who dominate the workforce. “This is an industry where you see countless female workers but often men in leadership positions,” she explains. “I realize that I need to try my best every single day, not just for myself but for all the amazing women working hard to provide for their families and build their own careers.”

Streamlining Senior Care With Care Hero

In 2024, Jamie co-founded Care Hero, a platform that reimagines how families and caregivers interact. Unlike traditional home care agencies, which offer little visibility into which caregiver families can work with and control the time and schedule a caregiver needs to work, Care Hero puts the choice in the hands of the families and caregivers, directly connecting families with qualified caregivers to make the process more flexible, transparent, and cost-effective.

The process starts with families filling out a short form detailing their care needs, schedules, and preferences or an intake call with a professional care navigator. Families then receive a list of vetted caregiver profiles carefully selected through a proprietary AI-powered matching algorithm based on location, availability, experience, skills, and compatibility. Families can then review multiple candidates and conduct interviews, choosing the caregiver who best fits their needs. After selecting a caregiver, they can choose to start with a 2-4 week trial period before committing long-term.

Care Hero manages all the vetting, background check, and administrative work to make this happen. The platform can even help families navigate coverage with their existing insurance such as long-term care insurance or Medicare, streamlining both the financial and administrative side of care.

This model not only makes high-quality care more accessible to the families, but also offers caregivers greater flexibility over their pay, schedules, and working conditions, providing them with the tools they need to control their careers. For example, Care Hero has worked with caregivers looking for additional income to support their nursing school or career development and single mothers who prefer a flexible schedule to balance their family responsibility and job opportunities.

As the platform’s co-founder and CEO, Jamie wants to expand Care Hero beyond home care services by addressing the other common challenges seniors face, including access to transportation, physical therapy, and skilled nursing. She also plans to further support caregivers through specialized training programs and career development opportunities, working toward a future where caregiving gets the financial and social value it deserves.

“Care Hero seeks to provide accessible, affordable care to the elderly,” Jamie explains. “But more importantly, we want to empower all the care workers looking after people — formally or informally — to be able to earn more and achieve their ambitions in life.”

A More Inclusive, Female-Led Vision For Senior Care

Jamie Gong is proving that women aren’t just essential to the senior care industry—they are its future. Through Care Hero, she has shown that women can lead transformative change even in male-dominated spaces.

By tackling inefficiencies in senior care and creating a model that benefits both families and caregivers, she’s expanding access to quality care while setting a precedent for women to step into leadership roles, challenge outdated systems, and build solutions that make a real impact for a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable future.

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The information contained in or available through this article is general in nature; it is not intended to be medical advice or a substitute for obtaining medical advice. The author makes no representation and assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of information contained in this article. You are encouraged to confirm any information obtained from or through this article with other sources and review all information regarding any medical condition or treatment with your physician.

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