Pillar Launches Collaborative Online Platform, Helping Families Better Protect & Care for Their Loved Ones
A must-have tool for the 50 million adults in the US who spend more than 400 hours a year taking care of older family members
Oct 21, 2020, 09:00 ET
NEW YORK, Oct. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, a family-first digital platform called Pillar launches to make it easier for people to organize and store their family's most important information in a secure online dashboard that they can share with other trusted family members. The innovative platform raised $1.5M in a seed extension led by Kleiner Perkins, totaling $7M for a seed round. Pillar provides step-by-step guidance on what to do as family members age and offers customized checklists that detail all the important information families might need to navigate that moment smoothly.
Pillar addresses all of the modern family's recordkeeping needs across medical, financial, legal, identity, and housekeeping information. The platform stores and organizes important documents and information, enables secure family collaboration, offers customized checklists, and even prevents fraud and scams targeting the elderly population. Documents such as power of attorney, healthcare proxy, advance directive, wills and trusts are now accessible remotely and securely by all trusted family members so decisions can be made quickly and without confusion.
"In 2017, my mom was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder. As my siblings and I stepped in to help her, we found there was no easy way to stay up to date on crucial affairs such as her insurance and medications. As paperwork from the hospital piled up, I spent hours researching what to do, what to keep, what to throw away, and more," says Michael Bloch, Founder & CEO at Pillar. "I realized there had to be a better way for a family to deal with this, so we launched Pillar to help people better protect and care for their loved ones. Pillar is especially valuable during the time of COVID, when people are struggling to manage all their responsibilities across children, partners, jobs, and now increasingly, the needs of their elderly parents that might live thousands of miles away."
Over 50M adults spend more than 400 hours each year informally taking care of just their older loved ones. Meanwhile, about 2.7 million children in the US are being raised by grandparents, other relatives or close family friends, with no parents in the home, according to the national advocacy group Generations United. Family life has never been this complex and the pandemic accelerated the need to have all documents and legal plans in place. A large segment of the population had to confront how little they were prepared for an emergency and millennials along with older parents have become caregivers overnight. While most family caregivers are older — the average age in 2015 was 49 — nearly a quarter, or about 10 million people, are millennials, born between 1980 and 1996, according to AARP.
Pillar is on a mission to make life less stressful for all caregivers by enabling them to better protect and care for their loved ones. Pillar educates its users with a library of resources featuring customized content for individual needs. The platform also includes a built-in fraud protection service that works behind the scenes to protect all family members. You can sign up for Pillar for $9.99 per month when paying annually ($119.88 per year) or $14.99 per month when paying monthly. All users will have access to resources and exclusive guides to make sure your loved one is protected from common scams and elder abuse.
Pillar is backed by notable investors including seed funding lead Kleiner Perkins, Rainfall Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Financial Venture Studio, Kairos, and Day One Ventures. Individual investors include Adam Nash; the former CEO of Wealthfront and Acorns board member, Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner; co-founders of Flatiron Health, and Zach Perret and Will Hockey, co-founders of Plaid.
To sign up for Pillar, please visit https://www.pillarlife.com/. You can also read https://www.pillarlife.com/blog for more information.
ABOUT PILLAR
Pillar is an online platform that lets families better protect and care for their aging loved ones. Pillar provides an online dashboard that lets people easily organize all their family's most important information. The platform replaces outdated and offline storage with modern digital tools that are secure, easy-to-use, up-to-date, and accessible by any trusted family member from anywhere. Pillar provides a number of other tools to help care for aging loved ones, including custom step-by-step guidance on what to do as your loved ones age and fraud monitoring tools to prevent common scams and elder financial abuse. The company was founded in 2018 to be the easiest and most effective way for people to pay back student loans by Michael Bloch after he experienced first-hand how broken the student loan industry is. Bloch expanded Pillar to make family life easier to manage after experiencing an illness in the family and seeing how difficult it was to coordinate care for his loved one. Pillar is based in New York City.
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SOURCE Pillar
