Lottie buys 25-year-old CareMaster billing to own the whole UK care journey

Lottie is a London healthtech that began as a care-home search marketplace, then moved into CRM and now billing software for UK care providers.

That owning billing — the last step of the care journey — completes a platform from first enquiry to payment, tripling money flow to £3bn a year by H1 2027.

Lottie connected families with care homes, then added the CRM providers use for enquiries and occupancy. Its first acquisition, the Found care-home CRM, was bought in 2022 for a reported £1.5 million when it served fewer than 100 locations.

On 2 October 2026 Lottie acquired CareMaster, a 25-year-old billing, payments and credit-control provider founded by Bob Grimshaw and Colin Rooke, for an undisclosed price — a customer-base-and-workflow purchase, not an acquihire. Social-care billing mixes private payers, local authority funding and NHS contributions, and CareMaster spent a quarter of a century handling it for nearly 75 providers across more than 750 care home locations. Lottie expects the combined platform to process £3bn in annual invoicing by H1 2027, up from roughly £1bn. The Found precedent is the template: rebuilt AI-native, it is expected to support nearly 2,500 UK care services by the end of 2026. CEO Will Donnelly's stated plan is to apply AI to credit control first, then work outward through billing, expand beyond the UK, and target record commercial growth in 2027.

Billing completes the platform: enquiry, occupancy and now payment — one vendor across the whole care journey is a stronger position than any single tool.

The Found precedent gives the strategy a track record: a £1.5 million CRM bought in 2022 is expected to reach ~2,500 care services by end-2026.

Care-billing complexity — private, local authority and NHS money in one invoice — is exactly the accumulated logic a marketplace startup cannot rebuild quickly.

Credit control is the right first AI target: repetitive, painful, and measured in numbers an operator can verify on their own ledger.

Buying an old, embedded workflow buys years of trust a startup cannot build: Lottie paid for 25 years of care-billing logic and the providers who already depend on it.

As of 2 October 2026 the combined platform targeted £3bn of annual invoicing by H1 2027; the material reports no integration milestones, price, or customer-retention figures yet.