Hera takes the second job out of caring for your parents

At her grandmother’s memorial, Jenny Lee began to understand what the family’s care arrangements had cost. Her grandmother had dementia. Her aunt had taken responsibility for appointments, insurance and the endless business of making one service connect to another. Lee had thought of her as a superhero. In Hera’s origin story, the memorial exposed the exhaustion behind that competence.

There is a peculiar promotion that comes with an aging parent. Without applying, you become a scheduler, benefits interpreter and telephone diplomat. Nobody sends a salary. Everybody sends a form. Hera, the company Lee co-founded, offers to give that job to somebody trained to do it.

The second job nobody applied for

Lee’s professional background helps explain the company’s shape. Before Hera, she was the founding product manager at Headway, the mental-health company. Her co-founder and COO, Connie Kang, also worked at Headway, following several years at Palantir. Myles Novick is Hera’s co-founder and CTO. This is a team with experience in software and in getting healthcare operations to function.

The underlying problem is easy to underestimate because its pieces look small. Book a follow-up. Check a prescription. Find transport. Each sounds manageable until the answer to one depends on the other two. A family can have excellent doctors and still struggle to assemble the instructions into an ordinary Tuesday.

Hera’s opening sits in that gap. Its customers are older adults and the families helping them, often adult children trying to keep a parent at home. The company sells continuity: someone knows the situation, knows what remains unresolved and returns to it.

A person who owns the next step

Hera calls its care experts “Heroes.” They include experienced social workers and nurses, with backgrounds in hospital social work, discharge planning, palliative care and hospice. The name is cheerful; the work is often bureaucracy with consequences. A Hero can coordinate appointments, help navigate insurance appeals, pursue Medicaid applications and connect a family with equipment or community services.

The first steps are deliberately practical. Hera checks coverage. A Hero and a Hera clinician learn the older adult’s history and priorities. Then comes an ongoing care plan. The distinction that matters is ownership: a recommendation gives a family another task; a coordinator can take responsibility for moving it forward.

This is care management. Families needing someone physically present to help with bathing, meals or overnight supervision need those services arranged separately. A Hero may help find them or navigate benefits that fund them. The distinction is essential when the word “care” can describe both a phone call and a person at the bedside.

The bill changes the audience

The price is central to Hera’s pitch. It says 90% of clients pay nothing out of pocket. Its current explanation points to Original Medicare’s Chronic Care Management benefit, with Medicaid or supplemental coverage typically meeting the remaining coinsurance. The business earns reimbursement for eligible services, bringing professional coordination to families who might otherwise manage everything themselves.

There are conditions attached. Medicare says Chronic Care Management requires two or more serious chronic conditions expected to last at least a year. After the Part B deductible, the standard patient share is 20% of the Medicare-approved amount. Hera verifies individual coverage; its $0 statistic describes existing clients, rather than a price promised to every visitor.

The company currently excludes Medicare Advantage and lists 12 supported states. Those boundaries shape its market. Alternatives include private geriatric care managers and coordination through an existing provider. Solace also markets insurance-covered patient advocacy. Hera’s public identity concentrates on aging parents and their families; insurance funding alone is not a unique distinction.

It also helps to separate the cost of the coordinator from the cost of everything coordinated. An insurance-covered relationship does not turn every recommended service into a covered benefit. Home care, equipment and transport each have their own rules. The useful question for a family is therefore twofold: what will Hera charge, and what will the services it helps arrange cost?

An AI with someone to answer to

Behind the Hero is Juno, Hera’s AI platform. The company describes help with documentation, billing and administrative work, alongside guidance drawn from accumulated care experience. The proposition is specific: let software absorb repeatable work so the person has more time for the family.

Local knowledge is part of that proposition. Which agency returns calls? Which specialist has availability? A directory can list a service without telling you whether it will be useful this week. Hera is trying to make such experience reusable across care experts. That is its stated operating approach, rather than proof that software can solve every local shortage.

“we only deliver care good enough for our own parents”

Hera’s stated care standard

There is a practical lesson here for anyone running a service business: give follow-through a named owner, then equip that person with knowledge others have already earned. For a family, the equivalent is to ask who will make the next call, what they need and when they will report back. A plan becomes useful when responsibility survives the meeting.

The model still depends on people outside Hera. A care expert can pursue an approval; the insurer decides it. Someone can locate an agency; that agency needs available staff. The value lies in informed persistence through these dependencies. Families should judge coordination by what moves forward, rather than by how reassuring the first conversation sounds.

For the reader weighing the service, this suggests a useful test: bring one unresolved problem to the coverage conversation. Ask what happens next and who handles it. The answer should describe work, rather than merely offer sympathy.

A life bigger than its appointments

Hera announced a $27 million Series A in June 2026, led by Bain Capital Ventures with Accel and IA Ventures participating. It reported serving more than 1,000 families with 95% retention. Those are company figures. The funding announcement set an ambition of reaching 25-plus states by year-end; its current published footprint remains narrower.

One detail complicates the usual healthcare story. Bain describes Hera organizing an art show for an 88-year-old retired psychiatrist: more than 800 people attended, and the work sold out within an hour. It is an appealing reminder of what coordination is ultimately for. Getting somebody to an appointment matters. Leaving room for the rest of their life matters, too.