The patients come first here, and in Brazil the patient in question is increasingly an 80-year-old in a fourth-floor São Paulo apartment whose daughter is trying to coordinate a rotating cast of caregivers over WhatsApp. That is the person Sanii is trying to serve, and the company's bet is that families will pay a monthly membership for someone, anyone, to take the scheduling, vetting, and clinical follow-through off their hands.
Sanii, founded in 2022 by Angelina Clarke, Michael Kapps, and Renato Tilkian, has raised roughly US$2.4 million in disclosed capital to build what it calls a closed marketplace for elderly home care, supported by an AI layer that handles matching, scheduling, and back-office work [Latam Republic]. The company reports more than 38,000 visits per year and 450,000 hours of care delivered (estimated), figures that are self-reported and not independently audited [StartupResearcher].
The patient, not the app
The wedge is unglamorous and, for that reason, defensible. Brazil's elderly home-care market is overwhelmingly informal: families hire a cuidador through a friend-of-a-friend, pay in cash, and absorb the risk when someone calls in sick or quits. Sanii's pitch is to professionalize that relationship by recruiting, vetting, and training caregivers, then matching them to families through a software layer that also handles shifts and remote monitoring [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
The revenue model is a monthly membership sold to the adult children, not the patient. That subscription bundles companion care, cognitive stimulation, physical activities, and social events for seniors [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. It is a tech-enabled services business with a thin AI veneer, and that is probably the honest way to read it: the moat sits in caregiver supply and operational discipline, not in the model layer.
Why now in Brazil
Brazil is aging faster than most of its institutions are ready for, and the country has nothing resembling the U.S. Medicare home-health benefit. That leaves families paying out of pocket for a service that is structurally fragmented. A platform that can guarantee continuity of a vetted caregiver, and absorb the back-office burden, is solving a problem that the public system is not going to solve any time soon.
The broader ambition is to grow into a full home-health stack: medicines, vaccines, diagnostic tests, physiotherapy, dental care, and IoT sensors [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief]. That is a long road, and one that will eventually run into ANVISA and the CFM, Brazil's medical regulator. For now, the company is staying in the lane it can actually execute on, which is companion care and wellness, framed as professionalization of an existing workforce [News Room USA, 2025].
The cap table
The round structure is small but well-populated for a Latin American healthtech at this stage. Sororitê Ventures led the most recent extension, with Seedstars, TipTop VC, Geist Capital, GVAngels, Valor Capital Group, Green Rock, and Norte Ventures on the cap table across rounds [Latam Republic][StartupResearcher].
Pre-seed 2023 | 1.5 | M USD
Seed 2024 | 0.93 | M USD
The team
The founding team brings operational and finance backgrounds rather than clinical ones, which fits a company whose hardest problem is logistics and labor management rather than medicine.
| Founder | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Renato Tilkian | Co-founder, CEO | Entrepreneur, board advisor, former M&A executive [LinkedIn, 2026] |
| Angelina Clarke | Co-founder, COO | Former Director of Brazilian Operations at Assured Labor [Forbes, 2012] |
| Michael Kapps | Co-founder | Harvard University [Crunchbase, 2026] |
Clarke has gone on the record framing the company's mission as enabling "movement of body, mind, and social life for purposeful aging after 60," which is also a fair description of the service bundle the membership actually delivers [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief].
Where the bet could break
Marketplaces in regulated, labor-intensive categories are unforgiving. The risks worth naming up front:
- Caregiver supply economics. A closed marketplace only works if Sanii can recruit and retain caregivers at a wage families will pay for via subscription. Margins in home care are notoriously thin, and competitors Cuidas, Laços, and Ho'oponopono are pulling from the same labor pool.
- Self-reported traction. The 38,000 visits and 450,000 hours figures are estimates carried in trade press, not audited disclosures [StartupResearcher]. A reader should treat them as directional rather than definitive.
- Regulatory drift into clinical services. The stated ambition to add diagnostics, vaccines, and physiotherapy moves the company from a labor marketplace into a regulated health provider, with the licensing and liability that implies.
- Capital intensity of the next leg. US$2.4 million in disclosed funding [Latam Republic] is enough to prove the São Paulo wedge; expanding into a multi-city home-health stack will require a meaningfully larger round.
The company's most plausible answer is that membership pricing plus operational software gives it a unit-economics edge over informal arrangements, and that staying in companion care and wellness for now keeps it out of the heaviest regulatory pockets.
What to watch next
The near-term tells are straightforward: a Series A round large enough to fund a second Brazilian city, a published retention number on the monthly membership, and the first clinical service category Sanii adds to the bundle. Each of those will reveal whether the closed-marketplace model holds when the caregiver pool, the customer base, and the regulatory surface area all grow at once.
The patient population at the center of all this is Brazil's growing cohort of older adults living with the predictable burdens of later life: dementia and cognitive decline, mobility loss, falls, the chronic conditions of the over-70 years. The standard of care today, for families who can afford anything beyond the SUS public system, is an informally hired caregiver paid in cash, with no continuity guarantee, no clinical oversight, and no backup when the caregiver is sick. The bar Sanii has to clear is not a competing app. It is the cousin's friend who shows up at 7 a.m. on weekdays and disappears at Christmas. Clearing that bar, repeatedly and at scale, is the actual business.
Sources
- [Latam Republic] Sanii Raises US$2.35M led by Sororitê Ventures | https://www.latamrepublic.com/sanii-raises-us-2-35m-led-by-sororite-ventures-to-expand-its-ai-powered-platform-in-brazil/
- [StartupResearcher] Sanii raises $926K to expand AI elderly care services | https://www.startupresearcher.com/news/sanii-raises-usd926-000-to-expand-ai-powered-elderly-care
- [Perplexity Sonar Pro Brief] Web-grounded research brief on Sanii
- [Crunchbase, 2026] Michael Kapps - Founder @ Sanii | https://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-kapps
- [LinkedIn, 2026] Renato Tilkian Molinari - Founder at Sanii | https://br.linkedin.com/in/renatotilkian
- [Forbes, 2012] What Are The Most Moves Ahead You've Ever Seen In Your Career? | https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/08/09/what-are-the-most-moves-ahead-youve-ever-seen-in-your-career/
- [News Room USA, 2025] Sanii: the healthtech that received R$13 million to care for the elderly | https://lnginnorthernbc.ca/2025/12/16/sanii-the-healthtech-that-received-r13-million-to-care-for-the-elderly/