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The struggle to find care that sparked a business
00:17:29
Greymate Care founder and CEO, Chika Madubuko, built a platform to make caregiving easier
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- [00:00]
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- [00:06]
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- [00:09]
Chika Madubuko
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- [01:19]
Lianna Byrne
Hello, I'm Lianna Byrne and welcome to meet the founders from Business Daily on the BBC World Service. This is where we speak to innovators around the world about the ideas, risks and realities behind starting a business today. How a family crisis sparked an idea that's now helping thousands of people find care across borders.
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Chika Madubuko
The first thing that I learned was compatibility using my grandma as the first person because I just thought it was enough to get someone who knew how to do the job.
- [01:51]
Lianna Byrne
Chika Madubuko is the CEO and Founder of Greymade Care, an online platform connecting elderly and vulnerable people with professional carers in Nigeria. That's our founder. Today, in many parts of the world, caring for older relatives is something families do themselves. It's expected, it's cultural. But that model is being tested. People are moving away for work, for education, and suddenly that support system isn't there. The same. That's something Chika Madubuko experienced firsthand when her grandmother became seriously ill. What followed was the idea for a business, one that uses technology to bridge that gap. I started by asking her about her early life.
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Chika Madubuko
I grew up in the northern part of Nigeria in a big family. I started schooling in Nigeria and then I finished at the University of Hertfordshire in the uk.
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Lianna Byrne
Did you like any particular subjects in school? Was there anything that, that maybe you look back on and say, yeah, that is where I am because of where I am today.
- [02:58]
Chika Madubuko
One trait that I had in school and I still have till today, would be curiosity. My core subjects would be chemistry, biology, physics, but it didn't matter because I excelled in the arts, which were like literature in English. English. And then curiosity came in because even books that were not like prescribed for us, you know, some prose, some poetry, I was just looking to them because I was very curious. I wanted to know how the minds of these authors worked at the time. And that part of me is still very much alive today.
- [03:32]
Lianna Byrne
How did you choose what you wanted to do at university? What led you to make those decisions?
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Chika Madubuko
The main thing that inspired me were just the way things worked in the world. So I finally continued with science, so microbiology, bioengineering, biotechnology. So it was quite fascinating to see that some problems could be solved with things that we had in our everyday lives.
- [03:58]
Lianna Byrne
And so did you pursue a career in science after that?
- [04:03]
Chika Madubuko
After that I did not really pursue a career in science. The first thing that I started doing was distribution and sales. So it happened that someone had seen me and just noticed that I had the knack to sell it out. Quote him to sell ice to the Himalayans. So, and as he would always say, most times the big contracts are not signed in offices, they're signed on a coffee table. So that really helped me both as an employee and as a business owner. And even up till today I always tell everyone like the core thing about building a business is sales. You have to let people know what you've done and you have to let them know how your solution fits with their problem, not just talking about your solution alone.
- [04:52]
Lianna Byrne
So what was your first job?
- [04:54]
Chika Madubuko
When I moved back to Nigeria, I started as a senior sales executive and bent about a year there I had been promoted again to business development manager. Went on to died you that's the makers of Bailey's Guinness. And I went on to launch my business. So my business, Grimit Care was born out of personal pain while I was in uni in the UK or as a part time job as a student. I was a caregiver. So I would work as a caregiver taking care of the elderly, you know, providing companionship. And it didn't mean anything at the time, it was just job I was doing that I really loved. So when I call home they would say things like, oh, grandma is sick. She's, she lives like far away. There's no one to take care of her. And then sometimes she would move around, like her children's homes, the grandchildren would take turns to take care of her. And before you know it, that grandchild who had just come back on vacation would, you know, be going somewhere else. And it just left gaps in her care. And it kind of bothered me because, remember, I was a caregiver and I saw how simple it was to schedule caregivers, to move people into people's homes for domiciliary care. And then I told my friend that I think this is something that I want to do. This is a problem that I want to solve. I just said it in passing, but somewhere at the back of my mind, I was kind of convinced that this is something that I now want to do. And I did. I was so afraid, I had no idea where to start. So I started asking people what they would want for this kind of business. Where are the pain points? And then of course, as you can imagine, my grandma was my guinea pig and I started with her. More people heard about the business and, you know, we launched the website, started the advert before, you know, it grew, care was born, and the rest is history, as they say.
- [06:51]
Lianna Byrne
Can you tell me about your grandmother?
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Chika Madubuko
I was really close to her. So she's. She was my mother's mom. She. Her name is Ego Ibo, which is funny because that translates to foreign wealth. So she was Madame Ego Ibo. So my mom was her last daughter. Daughter. And you know, we're always going to see her. And she would come to my house each time My mom had a baby for something called omogo, which is still very common in Nigeria. So the thing was she, she became sick and before we knew it, it deteriorated into diabetes and she became bed bound. She needed help getting out of bed with just daily life activities. And it became a problem because she lived in the rural part of Nigeria and her children had all moved to the urban Nigeria. So even if they wanted to take care of her, it required a lot of traveling. There were infrastructure challenges, you know, phone network connectivity, things like that. So she needed to be in someone's house. But the problem was these people were working, so finding someone was very difficult. And the other pain point was that it wasn't enough to just find someone, but you had no idea who you were finding. How do you know this person has been trained? What background check has been done? Due to this, the app was born. So our app, first of all helps connect anybody to a caregiver who's close to them. That's one. And with the app, the payment is very seamless. You can pay from any part of the world. And then the best part is the GPS tracking where people have to sign in the moment they've come in. So that way, even if you leave your grandma in the rural area and you're not there, you know for sure that someone is caring for her because you can monitor their reports at the end of each shift. So you just know you have that piece of that someone is being cared for.
- [08:44]
Lianna Byrne
You told me that your grandmother, she was almost like your guinea pig. Do you have any stories from those early days of what she thought about it? Maybe some of the teething out parts of the business that you guys figured out together?
- [08:56]
Chika Madubuko
So for her, the first thing that I learned was compatibility, using my grandma as the first person, because at the time that I started, I just thought it was enough to get someone who knew how to clean or someone who knew how to help prompt her to take her meds, or someone who, you know, could just do the job. But one thing that I didn't pay attention to was that compatibility. So could they communicate? Even though the person was there, did she still feel lonely? And the first time she kind of complained about the person that came in saying, after doing her job, she just sits in the corner and she would like to ask her things, but the person didn't want to. And on the other hand, this person, when we tried to ask questions, said, oh, she was doing it out of respect, that she didn't think that she wanted to have a conversation with her. And she, she thought talking to her felt like being nosy. So that compatibility on, hey, what do you want? There are people who would like that kind of person anyways, where they just want you to do your job and go sit in the corner. And there are some people who want to chat. So things like that, we started adding those preferences to the collection points when we collect the data for the kind of person you're looking for. And the good thing was with my grandmother, I saw feedback as feedback. I wasn't worried. It was like criticism or she was going to churn. I knew she meant well. And after that, I started viewing my business like an actual business, like a brand, right? No longer like a hobby or just the solution that I wanted to test out. So from there, we started selling to distribution channels. So that would be partnering with hospitals who actually discharged these people.
- [10:37]
Lianna Byrne
So when did you start taking on more staff?
- [10:40]
Chika Madubuko
I started very lean, so it was me. And then I had a friend who was the CTO at the time, she helped build out the solution. But for many things that I couldn't afford, I used what I would call social currency. And then when it came to setting up office, luckily Lagos State had this workspace vouchers that they gave out to people who were starting up businesses within the state. So I was one of the people that won those vouchers and they helped me set up in a co working space. We then had an actual office for like correspondence, for letters, but it wasn't very big, which was okay because most of the care was happening in people's homes. So it was a very lean start, which was very attractive to investors or partners because they could see that I kept the burn very low.
- [11:35]
Lianna Byrne
Tell me about getting investments. I'm sure that is quite difficult. Going up there and saying, can I have this money so that I can scale my business? And just the idea that you're like, these people have to believe in me
- [11:47]
Chika Madubuko
getting investment is, is the most, would I say the most difficult thing. Because it's a paradox because you're looking for money to run the business while the investor wants you to have run the business before you come looking for the money. So you're caught in the middle saying, if I had this money, then you would see these numbers and investors saying, but give me the numbers so that I give you the money. They could see what the business was. But we were kind of the pioneers in the market. So there weren't like a lot of businesses like this to compare against. So one thing that did the magic was the market size. Just in Africa and Asia alone, you were looking at about, I think, a $200 billion market. And this was even before you started adding other verticals globally. So globally it's a two sided market. You're thinking about working with the locals in let's say a UK for example, and you're thinking about working for immigrants in those countries who have their people in the country you started with. Right. So when we ran the numbers and showed them how this could grow even at a margin of 25%, it became attractive for them and that was how they managed to invest. But before then it was pretty difficult. And just to help us get through, we were using some grants, money from family and friends, bootstrapping my own savings. Up until 2018, we had spent, spent about $300,000 of our own money.
- [13:23]
Lianna Byrne
So tell me about the scale of the business now. How many people do you employ, how many people use the app and how many caregivers? Even are working through it right now.
- [13:33]
Chika Madubuko
We've employed over 12,000 caregivers. And then for the families that we've served, We've served over 9,000 families since inception. And we've expanded into three countries officially. And right now we're looking into expanding into more countries within the Asian sector before the year runs out.
- [13:57]
Lianna Byrne
You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
- [14:03]
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- [14:52]
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- [15:34]
Lianna Byrne
I'm Lianna Byrne and today on Meet the Founders I'm talking to Chica Madubuco, the CEO and founder of Greymate Care Care. It's a platform connecting families with professional carers. In Nigeria, Chika told me how digital tools and increasingly AI are shaping the way the care is delivered on our
- [15:53]
Chika Madubuko
app to collect the data from the service. Users say they are vitals. It's very simple. Some things are already pre filled for them and they just have to enter like Numbers use smiley to show their mood. Initially there are people who are kind of hesitant to use it it those children of the service users. So they had issues around like data, where is my personal data going? So we showed them the checks that we had in place, the GDPR compliances, HIPAA compliances and when they started seeing how much this let them control and have insight into their parents care from anywhere in the world, they adopted it.
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Lianna Byrne
What about those carers that give that face to face care? You've mentioned earlier that you have to make sure that those people are completely legit. How do you do that? Through technology.
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Chika Madubuko
Technology helps with first of all their background checks on our back end. When they submit their documentation, whatever it is, their training, their IDs, it goes straight through a verification process that helps verify that. So bad eggs are kind of sifted out from the beginning. And then secondly on the background check site, the same thing, the partnership with like the authorities in those countries, countries saying hey, this person, has this person ever been arrested? Is there any criminal record on this person? And then with training, so onboarding them we have like the lms that's the learning solution on there to bring them up to speed on what they're doing. You know, train them, show them how this is done, rate them as well, have their reviews sent in immediately after job. We actually have a 3% acceptance policy. I know, but it just gives every user peace of mind that if it's from Graymaker, then it's the actual person that you want in your parents home.
- [17:42]
Lianna Byrne
I'm sure you go through a lot of challenges as a founder of your business. Would one of them be the fact that in Africa there is still a lot of areas where people don't have access to the Internet and don't necessarily have access to a smartphone or even a laptop?
- [17:56]
Chika Madubuko
That's actually true. The Internet penetration is beginning to improve at least now in 2026. But for those areas that are now very bad, we're working on a USSD solution that, that does not require Internet to replace the app.
- [18:12]
Lianna Byrne
Everyone's talking about AI at the moment. Is there any way that you're using AI currently or you'd like to use it in the future?
- [18:18]
Chika Madubuko
You know, the truth is we, we had actually started dabbling into AI as far back as 2022 before it became a buzzword. And the thing with AI is it helps with prediction, monitoring. So one way we're looking at AI was to prevent falls because we were trying to get wearables on our to monitor the parts of their home, like triggers that will make them fall, the end of the rooms and things like that, even for the ones that were blind. So that they get alerts when they're moving towards danger and then it alerts their child or the caregiver if they've gone home. And then another thing was monitoring the data. So before the service sponsor or their medical doctor gets a hold of their data, the AI we were looking at was to interpret the vitals, create data interpretation and send out immediate alerts that, hey, for like three days now, this person has consistently reported, like, high blood pressure. Do you want to come in and check in? Because this is an anomaly.
- [19:22]
Lianna Byrne
So what do you wish you'd known before starting the company?
- [19:26]
Chika Madubuko
That I didn't spend so much time on the product, on the, on the tech and all of that because I noticed that real growth started happening when I, you know, focused on customer feedback, selling, explaining the solution, reiterating the product based on what the once, and that has led to exponential growth within the business.
- [19:48]
Lianna Byrne
That was Chica Madibuko, CEO and founder of Graymade Care. And that's it for this week's Meet the Founders with me, Liana Byrne. The producers were Ahmed adan and Neve McDermott. If you enjoyed this, you can find more conversations like it by searching for Business Daily wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to get in touch, the email is Business Daily. Business daily@BBC.co.uk thank you for listening.
- [20:22]
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