Hera Health co-founder and CEO Jenny Lee and BCV partner Alysaa Co discuss building a new profession in senior care, why trust is the product, and what an 88-year-old’s art show sold out in an hour has to do with changing the culture of aging in America.

The problem Jenny set out to solve is structural. Forty million Americans are providing unpaid care for aging relatives, shouldering a burden that existing systems were never designed to support. Older adults without adequate care are 34 percent more likely to be hospitalized, driving tens of billions in avoidable costs. Hera’s answer is to create an entirely new profession: dedicated senior care experts, called heroes, covered by Medicare and affordable to every family that will eventually need one.

Where traditional care coordination means transactional phone calls and siloed logistics, Hera builds a shared intelligence layer from every interaction. Every call, email, and text gets ingested so that the system learns continuously, freeing care experts to focus on what technology cannot replace: human connection. Families save roughly 12 hours a month today, with significantly more on the horizon as automation deepens on the back end.

Trust, Jenny explains, is not just a value. It is the mechanism. As Hera earns it with families, it earns the right to take on more. That philosophy extends to how Hera shows up in the world. An art show the company organized for an 88-year-old retired psychiatrist went viral on TikTok, drew over 800 attendees, and sold out his work within the first hour, with Alysaa Co learning about it from friends before realizing Hera was behind it.

For Jenny, this is the point. If Hera succeeds, aging in America stops being something overlooked and starts being something celebrated. The company is building toward a future where technology works seamlessly in the background and Hera becomes healthcare’s most trusted interface, one family at a time.