A local startup that aims make life easier for adults aging in place has raised its first round of funding to support a national launch — starting in Greater Washington.
Dorvie Inc., a subscription-based home concierge company that connects seniors with services like house cleaning, home maintenance and meal delivery, has secured $2.6 million in seed funding from 11 senior care organizations to begin rolling out its offering in the region. That work includes developing its tech platform and data systems, building up its network of service providers and hiring up “to underpin nationwide growth,” CEO Hersh Fernandes told us.
The Chevy Chase, Maryland, company, which was incorporated in December and has been up and running since March, partners with businesses to offer a broad range of services at affordable prices. It does so by negotiating rates with those providers and passing savings to the customers “so they’re paying below market rate,” Fernandes said.
Pricing is determined based on the services an individual selects, but monthly payments start at around $215, he said. Members receive just one monthly bill.
Dorvie — its name is a play on the French term “vie d’or,” which means “golden life” — has so far struck partnerships with 11 area vendors, including Elite Handyman Services, and meal-delivery service Vegetable and Butcher, both of D.C., and Spekless Cleaning of Arlington.
“We are building a base of members across the D.C. region and are able to grow to serve thousands of individual members with our current infrastructure,” Fernandes said. From there, he added, “we are evaluating several other large U.S. metro markets with large populations of retirees as targets for future expansion.”
Dorvie also intends to use the fresh funding to expand its three-person team. It plans to add two staffers immediately and hire others to create content, organize meetup events and grow Dorvie’s public profile “as a trusted resource in this space,” Fernandes said.
The startup’s goal, Fernandes said, is to save members time and money by handling all of the logistics. The company is targeting 100 initial members who will help the team “understand exactly what problems we solve in our users’ lives and how,” Fernandes said. It aims to have hundreds of members by the end of 2022 and more than 1,000 members “by the latter half of 2023,” he said.
Prior to Dorvie, Fernandes held posts with Booz Allen Hamilton, the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, Amazon Web Services and The White House, where he worked for then-Vice President Joe Biden from 2010 to 2012.
He runs the startup with Anthony Ciochetto, Dorvie’s chief operating officer, who was previously a financial analyst at Chicago’s Conagra Brands and a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot; and Daniel Thayer, Dorvie’s chief technology officer, and a former official at the Transportation Security Administration.
Dorvie is a product of Quantified Ventures Solution Studio, a Chevy Chase, Maryland, venture that helps startups scale by providing strategic planning and business development, financial, legal and marketing support.
The concept for Dorvie was born through a collaboration between the studio and a group of nonprofit elder care organizations as a way to reach the roughly 90% of seniors who have no intention of moving into retirement communities, Fernandes said.
The senior living centers “sought a better way to reach and serve the people who might never move into one of their properties,” he said.
