The Story
A Race Against
Time - and Genetics
George Netscher did not set out to raise $134 million. He set out to make sure his mother did not fall.
His grandmother and aunt both had Alzheimer's. Both struggled with falls. His mother - a physician who immigrated from South Africa, who spent years balancing a career in medicine with the slow, exhausting work of caregiving - watched the trajectory of both women and understood what it might mean for her own future. George understood it too. So in 2015, he enrolled in UC Berkeley's computer science PhD program with a specific purpose: build the technology that might change the story.
The AI Research Lab at Berkeley was already one of the five most respected groups of its kind in the world. Netscher did not go there to do abstract research. He went there to build something. The CITRIS seed fund backed the idea. His advisor had a family connection to Alzheimer's disease. The lab understood what it was working toward. By the time SafelyYou spun out, it was not just a startup - it was a mission that had been stress-tested against real grief.
What SafelyYou actually does is almost defiantly simple: cameras in senior living rooms, running computer vision algorithms trained on the particular way that a person with dementia loses their balance. No wearables. No buttons. No devices that require the resident to remember to use them. Just ambient, unobtrusive surveillance designed to catch a fall the moment it happens - or better, to identify the patterns that predict a fall before it occurs.
I was inspired to create SafelyYou because of my family's experience with Alzheimer's, and so my mom could have better care. But it's really for all families, so every mom and dad can have the best care possible as they age.
- George Netscher, Founder & CEO, SafelyYou
The results from the field are not incremental. Communities using SafelyYou report approximately 40% fewer falls. Fall-related emergency room visits drop by as much as 80%. Those are not software-demo numbers. Those are numbers that show up in hospital admission rates and insurance claims and conversations between adult children and care coordinators. Netscher's clinical team has analyzed more than 300,000 on-the-ground events to get there. That is not a model trained on theory. That is a model trained on what actually happens at 2 a.m. in a memory care wing.
By early 2025, SafelyYou had closed a $43 million Series C, bringing its total raised to over $134 million. The company serves nearly 1,000 senior living communities across the country. In May 2025, Netscher was elected to the Board of Directors of Argentum - the national association representing senior living operators - for a three-year term. It was a formal acknowledgment of what the field had already accepted quietly: SafelyYou is not peripheral to senior care. It is becoming infrastructure.
