Aquarate's 5 Year Anniversary!
Today, Aquarate are celebrating 5 years in business. Over that time, the company has gone from a one man band playing with sensors in a university dorm to having created the world's first automated hydration tracking system supplying care homes and domiciliary users across the country and revolutionising the way care staff monitor fluid intake.
Aquarate's CEO and Founder, Rebecca Taylor, talks about what has driven the business’ success over the years and what the anniversary means to her.
This week, we celebrate Aquarate's 5th Anniversary! What thoughts and emotions come to mind when you think about that?
Turns out it wasn't just my Gran that was significantly dehydrated, the majority of us are and it is affecting us all! I could never have imagined taking the product from idea to market and beyond within the short space of time. I am incredibly proud of the team and thankful to all our supporters and customers who believed in us from the beginning.
Maybe you can tell us a little of the story of how you got started 5 years ago?
As a Design Engineer I wanted to make a difference with the designs I created. I visited my Gran regularly and started to see the disparity between technology and our elderly population. I made a prototype and began to test the technology.
I could see my Gran was suffering from dehydration and having falls because of it, turns out it's a global problem and I was quickly backed by private equity investment, consultants and NHS organisations.
What have been the highlights for you? What excites you most?
Looking back the highlights come from people.
I have witnessed such passion from nurses and care staff that taught me the significance of hydration, which in the early days gave me such direction and fight to continue development.
The feedback from customers as we have developed and now sell Hydracare Technology has been exciting too. I can’t get enough of hearing how someone's day has been improved due to improved hydration management.
And finally, building our own wonderful team of passionate individuals who share the same vision as me; to see a new generation using technology to aid their ageing.
What has driven Aquarate's success? I hear the team is tripling in size and orders are flowing in- so what have been the main contributing factors to the growth?
We are successful because we care for people, to solve a real problem and genuinely want to make a difference creating technology that is going to change the way care is delivered in the years to come.
Over the last 5 years I have had a continued level of vision for the future growth of the business and made sure we developed an offering that no one else within the technology enabled care market was doing. Lots of people are working on reactive digital tools but not many people are looking at improvements on fundamentals required for everyday living of which we are focused
So what's next for Aquarate? What will the next 5 years bring?
We will of course continue to look after our customers, making design improvements, growing the team and the offering we have. However, we expect to be making a difference on a national scale. We aim to understand from a data point of view the clinical and economic cost benefit to monitoring hydration accurately within care and along with our NHS partners be able to set national guidelines and best practices for hydration monitoring.
To say the least, big plans.... we have a number of other exciting technologies in the pipeline to support everyday ageing and we expect to grow outside of the UK very soon!
Aquarate are on a journey to digitally transform how a basic human need is monitored. We want to give care professionals the accurate data they need to help proactively care for patients to save time, to save lives and to save money. We’re proud of our achievements in the last 5 years but we’re just getting started!