How Personal Loss Drove Three New York Founders to Reinvent Senior Care
When Raj Mehra’s grandmother fell in a care facility, help did not arrive in time. That moment — painful, preventable, and all too common — became the foundation of a company that is now changing how thousands of seniors across the United States receive care.
Mehra, along with co-founders Ellen Johnston and Matt Lynch, launched Sage in 2020 after crossing paths at Palantir Technologies. What started as a shared frustration over broken care systems has grown into a platform operating in hundreds of facilities across 26 states, and in March 2026, the New York-based startup closed a $65 million Series C round, bringing its total funding to $124 million.
Three Founders, One Shared Frustration
Mehra, Johnston, and Lynch did not set out to build a senior care company. They met through Palantir and its extended network, but it was their personal experiences — not their professional ones — that brought them together around a problem worth solving.
Mehra watched his grandmother grow increasingly frail while living with his family. When she fell, the response was too slow. “I thought to myself, everyone is doing their level-best here and everyone is still losing,” he said. Lynch had similar experiences with aging loved ones navigating a system that felt disconnected and reactive. Johnston, who had previously co-founded Makr, a design tools startup acquired by Staples in 2015, brought product expertise and a firsthand understanding of what it means to build and scale technology that people depend on daily.
Together, they identified a gap that the healthcare industry had largely ignored: the tools used inside senior living facilities were decades old. Pull cords, call buttons, and disconnected communication systems left caregivers without the data they needed and residents without reliable, timely help.
Replacing the Pull Cord
Sage’s platform addresses this gap directly. The company replaces traditional pull-cord systems with voice-activated and press-enabled devices that residents wear or have installed in their rooms. When a resident signals for help, the request flows into a caregiver coordination app that allows staff to triage responses, document interactions, and track patterns over time.
The difference between a cup of coffee request and a cardiac emergency is something experienced caregivers understand — but legacy systems treat every button press the same. Sage introduces intelligence into that process, helping facilities distinguish urgent needs from routine ones and direct resources accordingly.
The results reported by Sage point to measurable operational improvements. Facilities using the platform have seen caregiver response times drop from an average of 20 minutes to under eight. Employee turnover — a persistent and costly challenge in senior care — has declined by 20% on average among Sage communities. For an industry that has long struggled with workforce shortages, those numbers carry real weight.
Building Across 26 States
Since its 2020 launch, Sage has expanded steadily, now operating in hundreds of senior living facilities across 26 states. The company’s growth reflects both the scale of the problem and the appetite for technology-driven solutions in a sector that has been slow to modernize.
The aging population in the United States is growing faster than the workforce available to care for it. Facilities are under mounting pressure to do more with less — fewer staff, tighter budgets, and rising resident acuity. Sage is positioned at the center of that pressure, offering tools that allow caregivers to work more efficiently without compromising the quality of care.
$65M Series C and What Comes Next
The March 2026 funding round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from IVP and Goldcrest Capital. The raise reflects continued investor confidence in the senior care technology space and in Sage’s trajectory specifically. With $124 million in total equity funding now secured, the company is positioned to accelerate product development, deepen its presence in existing markets, and push into new ones, including at-home care.
One initiative already in motion is the company’s first Caregiver Summit, scheduled for fall 2026 in New York City. The event will bring together frontline workers, senior living operators, and industry leaders to shape how technology should evolve inside care facilities. For Mehra and his co-founders, keeping caregivers at the center of that conversation is not just good strategy — it reflects the values that drove them to start the company in the first place.
A New York Startup Built Around People, Not Just Technology
Sage is a New York story in the truest sense — built from personal experience, refined through the city’s dense network of talent and capital, and driven by a mission that extends well beyond market opportunity. What began with a grandmother’s fall and a team of founders asking hard questions has grown into infrastructure that thousands of seniors and caregivers now rely on every day.
