When Ben Maruthappu founded Cera in 2016, the pitch was straightforward: an online marketplace where families could browse and book individual carers, much as they might search for a rental property or a taxi. The model was familiar to investors, asset-light by design, and almost immediately ran into the realities of elderly care.

Families did not want to browse. They wanted the same carer to arrive at the same time each morning. Gig-economy workers, by definition, were not structured to provide that. Within a short period of launching, Maruthappu concluded that the model he had built was not fit for the problem he was trying to solve.

"Success can be a ceiling if you become complacent," he said. "Fighting your own momentum when you're succeeding is difficult, but it is the only way to avoid the status quo."

That first reassessment led Cera to abandon its pure platform model and register as a regulated, operational care provider. It was not a popular decision. Investors who had backed a technology company were now looking at something that employed carers, managed rotas, and carried the regulatory obligations of a social care business. Several warned that the shift would limit growth. Maruthappu's position was that growth built on a flawed model was not worth preserving.

The distinction matters, because it became the template for everything that followed.

Having established itself as a care provider, Cera initially pursued private-pay customers through conventional advertising. The economics of that market soon pointed elsewhere. The NHS and local councils fund the substantial majority of home care in the United Kingdom, and targeting individual families directly meant operating at the margins of a publicly financed system rather than within it. Cera's second significant shift was to pursue public sector contracts, positioning itself as an operational partner to commissioners rather than a consumer-facing service.

The decision reframed the company's purpose. Maruthappu described it not only as a commercial adjustment but as the logical response to a social care system under sustained pressure. Local authority care budgets have been constrained for years, demand from an ageing population has continued to grow, and the workforce supplying that care has not kept pace. Cera's argument was that technology could improve the efficiency and quality of care delivery at scale in a way that a fragmented, analogue system could not.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Cera was conducting around 100,000 home visits per month. It now delivers 2.5 million. That expansion was partly driven by a third structural change: licensing its technology to other care providers rather than treating it as proprietary infrastructure. Critics questioned whether sharing the platform would reduce whatever advantage Cera had built. Maruthappu referenced Amazon's trajectory from retailer to cloud services provider as a parallel. Extending the technology's reach, he argued, increased both its utility and its value.

Cera has raised more than $150 million in funding and reached unicorn valuation. Its annualised revenue stood at $500 million in 2025, generated through a combination of care delivery, public sector partnerships, and technology licensing.

The company's current focus is robotics. Following a recent acquisition, Cera has begun deploying robots capable of issuing medication reminders, monitoring hydration, providing companionship, and supporting behavioural interventions such as smoking cessation. Maruthappu's case for automation is demographic rather than ideological. The number of people requiring care in the United Kingdom is rising. The number of people available to provide it is not rising at the same rate. At some point, he argues, the arithmetic becomes the argument.

Whether robots can meaningfully fill that gap remains an open question. What Cera's trajectory does illustrate is that Maruthappu has consistently been willing to dismantle what was working before it stopped working. In a sector that has resisted modernisation for decades, that instinct has, so far, proved more valuable than any single model he has built.