By Sandy Jen
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Honor
Look out old age. Honor is officially a unicorn. A unicorn with a mission. We just announced the closing of our Series E funding round, raising $370M to develop and scale more innovative technology with a charter to help people age better. This funding puts Honor’s valuation at over $1.25 billion.
As the Honor co-founder who leads Engineering, I am over the moon. And so is my team. While billion dollar companies aren’t as rare as they used to be, only about 2.5% of start-ups reach this stage. So, yeah, it’s kind of a big deal. But the much bigger deal is that we can positively impact many more lives.
This news also turns more heads to a space that needs so much more attention and investment. The population of our aging loved ones is growing massively and we need a lot more help to address it. This funding, coupled with our recent acquisition of the largest home care network in the world, Home Instead, allows us to triple (triple!) our investment in Product and Engineering.
That means we can accelerate and kickstart many of the amazing product initiatives that we’ve been researching and planning since our founding. We're poised to make the Honor platform the global innovation engine for aging—the resource that gives people access to answers, services, and products to address all the needs of their aging loved ones. We’ll continue to brainstorm big, bold ideas, but now they can grow even bigger and bolder. And we can bring more of them to life. The impact we can have on the ballooning population of aging adults is huge, exciting, and most importantly, more achievable than ever before.
Let the hiring begin
This infusion of funding is also incredibly exciting for the 50+ talented engineers, product designers, product managers, data analysts, and data scientists currently working at Honor. It’s validation that their brilliant work is highly valued, game-changing, and ultimately life-changing for our clients and Care Pros. And it opens up a ton of new doors for us to develop even more innovative technology. It should be exciting for product people everywhere, too—especially to those who want to use their tech talents for good. Because Honor is ready to hire more of you. A lot more.
That said, we also want to preserve what makes the team we’ve built so special. A big part of that is our shared passion for solving hard problems in a challenging industry. There’s just so much opportunity to do good here. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many things that keep us all motivated to do what we do, together. Here are a few big ones.
The top 5 reasons to join Honor
1. We’re on a mission Home care is so important for our parents—and for us one day. Ninety percent of aging adults say they want to continue to live at home, but a lot of them don’t have the support they need to do so. Honor’s mission to “change the way we care for parents” couldn’t come at a more important time, as the size of our older population is about to skyrocket. And now, with our acquisition of Home Instead, we have the opportunity to impact so many more people around the world. We know that what we’re doing is valuable, every day. - Harshitha Rajendra, Engineer
2. We prioritize team culture “Honor has managed to create and maintain the most supportive environment that I’ve experienced in a professional setting. In the tech industry, it can be hard for an engineer to acknowledge that they don’t know something and ask for help. But everyone here is humble and genuinely interested in building a good product that supports care. So we all teach and learn from each other constantly. It’s a great opportunity to grow as an engineer. Since we’re 100% remote, we make it a point to schedule virtual lunches, happy hours, Monday morning coffee, game nights, we even organized a remote escape room. We make time to hang out socially because we truly like each other.” - Brian Lubars, Engineer
3. We value diverse voices and skills “Working as a woman on an engineering team inevitably makes you feel like you are part of the minority, but at Honor, I’ve experienced that the numbers don’t impact how much you are heard and valued. In the past 2.5 years with Honor, I’ve always felt supported to make as much impact to the team and company as anyone else, no matter the gender or years of experience.” - Nancy Huang, Data Analyst
4. We have a strong connection to the people we build for “One of the things that makes Honor unique is that everyone on the Engineering team has a really good grasp of the company and what it’s doing. Everyone understands who the stakeholders are, what concerns our clients have, and how we can best serve them. Everyone can map what they build to the person it helps. As we grow, we’re going to invest in ensuring that everyone on our team can continue to do that.” - Alan Talanoa, VP of Engineering
5. We’re on the brink of something big “With our acquisition of Home Instead, we’re spinning up a ton of exciting projects that will impact an even wider net of clients and caregivers. The next set of engineers joining us will have a strong impact on this next generation of products. Whether from an architectural or product viewpoint, we have a large set of challenges that we’re approaching thoughtfully.” - Ned Fox, Engineering Manager
As Honor staffs up our Product & Engineering team, we’re looking for folks who want to build a lot and release often. Who are open to touching a multitude of products and all parts of the tech stack, from back-end to mobile. Who are eager to learn from and teach their teammates. Who want to make life better for people like their grandparents, parents, and eventually themselves. We’re looking for product managers, product designers, developers, and data folks who are passionate about helping us provide better care for aging adults and for the people who care for them. And our full remote work model means we’re able to hire talent in all 50 states.
Highly respected investors have signaled their confidence in Honor for seven years, through six rounds of funding. Our latest financial milestone and recent Home Instead acquisition have secured us on a track to realizing our mission on a global level, even faster than we imagined. What once felt possible, then probable, now feels inevitable. It’s good to be a unicorn. It’s better to change the world. Come join us.
