SEATTLE— Today Rippl, a leading dementia-focused specialty care provider, announced it has acquired Kinto, a Boston-based, AI-enabled dementia caregiver support platform. This combination will fuel reaching an exponentially larger group of people living with dementia and their caregivers with human-centered care far beyond traditional bricks-and-mortar models.
This partnership brings together Rippl’s proven dementia care model, validated by clinical research including the UCSF Care Ecosystem Study, and Kinto’s acclaimed evidence-based, AI-enabled dementia caregiver support and education program. Kinto’s product development has been driven by more than six million dollars of state and federal research grants from the National Institutes of Health. This work includes state-of-the-art Generative AI tools that augment the work of trusted care teams who guide caregivers through their incredibly challenging care journeys.
“Joe Chung and his remarkable team at Kinto are deeply committed to helping this unique and undervalued population of dementia caregivers in taking care of their family members while also taking care of themselves. Using Kinto’s advanced AI tools and existing platform, this partnership will help us accelerate our technology capability to give more and better care to both our patients and their caregivers,” said Kris Engskov, Rippl Co-Founder and CEO.
Echoing this sentiment, Kinto founder and CEO Joe Chung shared, “Kinto was founded to harness technology to dramatically improve the dementia caregiver experience and we have validated that our model can do just that. By partnering with Rippl, we can combine, enhance and scale our solutions to become leaders in virtual dementia care.”
The entire Kinto team will join Rippl, with Chung as CTO and Head of AI who will lead the charge as they integrate AI into their systems. The aim is to ultimately liberate care navigators and clinicians from their keyboards and allow them to focus attention on doing what only they can uniquely do, guiding and supporting families with specialized support.
Chung added, “AI will revolutionize dementia care navigation and caregiver support by vastly expanding access and availability of this critically needed service.”
The two CEOs were introduced by investor Tracy Chadwell, founding partner at 1843 Capital. “The combination of Rippl and Kinto is a classic 1+1=3. Having worked with both Kris and Joe, I know their skill sets are unique and very complimentary. Rippl is now positioned to be the leading player in dementia care with a comprehensive and empathetic model, ethically employing the scaling power of AI,” said Chadwell.
Both leaders are single-mindedly focused on maximizing their impact on this crisis. The scale of the problem remains staggering with almost 7 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s dementia and 11.5 million caregivers providing unpaid care, a number set to double over the next few years.
Rippl Director and investor Holly Maloney, Managing Director at General Catalyst, added, “I am incredibly excited about this move; Rippl and Kinto have developed highly complementary capabilities. Their shared vision on how to leverage generative AI to supercharge the delivery of better access to higher quality care will be incredibly powerful in advancing dementia care.”
The acquisition closed on April 15, 2024.
