Christopher and Gregg Fous are Building AtendaCare: The AI Companion for Caregivers and Physicians

Americans spend $13 billion a day on healthcare. Yet thousands of additional hours of care happen at home, between doctor’s appointments, and are completely invisible to physicians.

Home caregivers, typically spouses or family members of the patient, are often responsible for managing patients’ conditions on a day-to-day basis. Most are untrained and unpaid, and are left to navigate the care journey without a clear support system or standardized tooling.

The care process becomes whatever caregivers can improvise, and care information gets scattered across physical notepads, apps, photos, and calendars. When caregivers bring their records to appointments, physicians struggle to make sense of the overwhelming amount of unstructured information.

Christopher Fous and his father, Gregg Fous, faced these challenges first-hand when caring for a family member diagnosed with vascular dementia. So they teamed up to launch AtendaCare and build the platform they wished they’d had.

Introducing AtendaCare: The Caregiving Companion for Caregivers and Physicians

AtendaCare is a conversational AI companion that supports family caregivers of people living with dementia and turns what happens at home into structured clinical documentation physicians can actually use.

The caregiver experience can be isolating, especially when caring for people living with dementia. “You feel incredibly alone, and sometimes having someone to vent to can be incredibly powerful and valuable," Christopher explains. AtendaCare’s conversational AI companion, Atenda, provides caregivers with support and guidance so that they don’t have to navigate the journey alone, bringing daily journaling, a dated record of what the caregiver observes, and ongoing conversational support into one place.

As Atenda receives notes, journal entries, and concerns from the caregiver, it produces concise clinical reports that physicians can process and act on. "“We take in a lot of information and give the doctor very little,” Christopher explains. “Just what matters, structured and easy to understand. A clinical window into the home.”

Christopher and Gregg know accessibility is critical, and therefore have designed AtendaCare to be paid for by the healthcare institution, not the caregiver. Many physicians are already doing this care management work but don’t always have the documentation to support it. AtendaCare’s monthly summaries are designed to support documentation for existing Medicare care management programs.

The Founders' Journey to Atenda

Five years ago, the love of Gregg’s life, Christopher’s stepmother of 30 years, was diagnosed with vascular dementia. Their family was reshaped as every aspect of their life changed.

As Gregg navigated the caregiver journey, he began developing the vision and knowledge base behind AtendaCare. Recognizing the value that a platform like AtendaCare could bring to dementia caregivers like Gregg across the country, Christopher joined him as co-founder, bringing years of experience in entrepreneurship, branding, and communication. “No one could have built AtendaCare the way that my father has because of his intimate, incredibly personal relationship with the disease and with the need," Christopher says.

Neither of them had worked in healthcare before building AtendaCare, so they knew it would be important to surround themselves with people with experience in the space. They hired a founding engineer with a HIPAA, AI, and LLM background, assembled a clinical advisory board, and engaged experienced healthcare counsel.

With the MVP nearing completion and its first clinical pilot partner in place, the team is preparing to begin pre-alpha testing with caregivers this fall. They’re currently raising a seed round.

In the long run, Christopher views dementia care support as the starting point, but not the ceiling, for AtendaCare. He aims to extend AtendaCare’s architecture to cancer recovery, stroke, Parkinson’s, and more as the company grows.

Advice for Fellow Founders

Christopher has experienced many approaches to company-building throughout roughly two decades as an entrepreneur. At his previous company, doing everything themselves was a point of pride, and bootstrapping was a badge of honor. “Now I know differently,” he says. “Being able to do it on your own is not necessarily something that you should be boasting about, because it could be your end."

As you scale, it’s important to find your zone of expertise and delegate everything outside of it. “I'm not a bookkeeper. I'm not an HR person. I don't do payroll, and I also don't want to be the person who has to organize all that stuff. So we’ve got a company like Every that can. We've got our healthcare counsel that I fully trust for compliance. I'm trusting what I normally would try to do myself to others."

For this father and son founding team, growing AtendaCare successfully isn’t just a means of making money. It’s the legacy Christopher’s stepmother leaves behind. “Yes, there's money to be made, but that's not what makes me jump out of bed to conquer another VC email,” Christopher says. “We're doing what we're doing because we fiercely believe in it. Do this for something beyond your bank balance."

To learn more about Christopher’s journey building Atenda, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit atenda.care.