I Had To Transfer In With With My Mother and father To Fund My Startup Concept 

Again in 2021, we featured a humble new child startup in our ‘Simply Began’ part. Lottie’s founders spoke enthusiastically about how their staff of 5 would higher “assist care seekers”. Simply over three years later, the social care titan has been topped winner of the 2025 Startups 100 Index, to affix an elite record of alumni together with UK startup royalty, Revolut.

“It’s so cool,” co-founder Will Donnelly enthuses. “I grew up in an entrepreneurial household and have been an avid reader of Startups 100 for so long as I can bear in mind.”

Advised through newspaper clippings, Lottie’s is a super-charged progress story. In some respects, although, the enterprise has existed for nearly ten years. It originated as a niggling frustration nurtured by Donnelly throughout his six 12 months profession in social care, when he found an “offline, fragmented, and underfunded sector with subsequent to no shopper transparency”.

Digitalisation is a buzz phrase in healthcare at this time. However Donnelly – and his brother and co-founder, Chris – noticed firsthand how desperately it was wanted. Add in some buyer surveys to verify the duo’s instincts, and a marketing strategy started to type.

“Households have been contacting, on common, six providers earlier than discovering a top quality supplier that match their funds necessities”, Donnelly tells Startups. “We determined to make it obligatory for listings on Lottie to showcase their service availability and costs”.

I’ve been an avid reader of Startups 100 so long as I can bear in mind.

The brothers launched Lottie, a B2C platform to match shoppers with care properties, in 2021. Coming off the again of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cracks inside the system had develop into jarring, paving the best way for brand spanking new and disruptive tech. “I used to be so excited to get going and to begin making a distinction to households”, says Donnelly. However the delivery was not with out challenges.

Donnelly’s dad was a enterprise proprietor himself, and the household was supportive. Which was fortunate, given the half the clan would play in Lottie’s story. “I moved again in with my mother and father at 25 years previous and took out a £10k mortgage to fund the primary six months of Lottie”, Donnelly reveals.

That was 12 months one. Since 2023, the brothers have launched a collection of options together with CRM software program, an worker advantages platform, a knowledge insights instrument, and most just lately, a home-care market, securing it a foothold in each later life care kind.

Extremely, Lottie is now the UK’s first listing of vetted care suppliers with clear charges and repair availability. With 5,000 companions onboarded to date, Donnelly says over 20 million households have been capable of fathom, discover, or fund later life care through the Lottie market.

I moved in with my mother and father to fund the primary six months of Lottie.

In startups phrases, Lottie can also be in its senior years. As a frontrunner within the stagnant international care market, although, Donnelly is aware of it should maintain shifting to set off an actual digital revolution. That mission assertion grew to become extra pressing firstly of this month, when the federal government introduced reforms to remodel grownup social care. Reforms that won’t start till 2028.

Donnelly is supportive of the plans to deal with the disaster, as he has been for the previous decade and a half. “These proposals date again to Gordon Brown and 15 years later, we’ve witnessed little or no actual progress”, he laments. “We have to see change ranging from at this time, not once we are more likely to begin speaking in regards to the subsequent normal election”.

In the meantime, Lottie has already taken on the mantle as changemaker. With legislative change nonetheless gradual, will probably be an uphill battle. Nonetheless, its founders’ willpower appears boundless. It has already secured them the Startups 100 gold medal. What’s the secret to such tenacity?

“I’d actually say half the battle of working a enterprise is discovering one thing that you just’re typically obsessed with and may spend 10+ years devoting your life to”, Donnelly admits.

“What’s stored me going, particularly within the robust occasions, is my unwavering ardour for serving to households and my deep need to repair the world’s damaged social care business.”

Lottie has been named the winner of the 2025 Startups 100 Index. See who else made the record and shall be main the cost for business change and innovation this 12 months.