Grandmama wins NN Social Innovation Startup Award 2026
Europe is ageing, and home care is one of the hardest things families have to figure out. The choice is usually between doing it alone or paying a traditional agency to do it for you. The Greek startup Grandmama wants to add a third option. Their AI-powered platform helps families find and coordinate caregivers directly, while ensuring they are paid fairly. Today, the startup won the third edition of the NN Social Innovation Startup Award at the Hello Tomorrow Conference in Amsterdam, receiving a grant of €100,000.
Home care, without the agency in the middle
Grandmama was founded by Vicky Klimi and Maria Miliou as an AI-powered caretech platform that supports families, elders and caregivers throughout the home-care process. A conversational Care Agent understands each family’s situation, asks the right follow-up questions, and delivers personalised caregiver matches. A real-time CareSync layer keeps families and caregivers coordinated. Grandmama already supports more than 8,500 families in Greece, with a network of 12,500 vetted caregivers and nurses, and has generated over 35 million dollars in caregiver salaries to date.
“This award means that the caregivers who show up every day to care for our elders finally get seen. With this prize, we will help thousands of them find decent jobs. We will get our AI tools into the hands of families who desperately need them, and prove that we can build a real business by doing right by one of the most invisible groups of workers in the world,” says Vicky Klimi, founder and CEO of Grandmama.
Six finalists closing the well-being gap
The third edition of the NN Social Innovation Startup Award drew 380 applications from ten European and Asian countries. Six finalists pitched at the Hello Tomorrow Conference in Amsterdam, each tackling a different part of the well-being gap: from accessible care and mental health to financial education, lifelong learning and inclusive culture. Grandmama won the award, receiving a grant of €100,000.
This award was created by the NN Social Innovation Fund and Rubio Impact Ventures to help early-stage, impact-driven startups reach their next stage. The aim is to scale solutions that improve access to well-being for underserved communities.
Capital and network
“Grandmama addresses a highly relevant challenge: many families struggle to organise home care. By combining support for families with job opportunities and fair pay, GRANDMAMA creates impact across the care ecosystem. It is exactly the kind of solution we want to support with this award,” says Fleur Hudig, Chair of the Board of the NN Social Innovation Fund.
“Grandmama did not take the shortcut. Building a full caretech platform is harder than running a marketplace. Vetting every caregiver is harder than leaving that to families. Reaching profitability is harder than chasing growth at any cost. Grandmama did all three, and the 8,500 families they have supported are the proof. We will support them as they reach many more, so that dignified care at home becomes the norm, not the exception,” adds Ilonka Jankovich, Venture Partner at Rubio Impact Ventures.
Other finalists
The other five finalists shared €100,000 in supporting grants:
Annie Advisor (Runner up) reaches students before they drop out. Their multilingual chatbot checks in with learners over WhatsApp or SMS and routes them to the right support service. Founded by Miska Noponen, Joonas Merikko and Lauri Jokipii, the platform is live across Finland, Estonia, Spain and the Netherlands, with one impact study showing a 25 percent year-on-year decline in dropouts.
ObsessLess is building a digital OCD care layer for the moments professional care cannot reach. The platform combines structured daily support, psychoeducation, and guided exercises based on evidence-informed OCD principles, helping users stay consistent while waiting for, preparing for, or continuing care. Founded by Mourice Schuurmans with Adrian Pavel and clinical advisor Dr Marina Gershkovich, the bootstrapped startup has already reached hundreds of paying users in under nine months.
eFrontiers tackles financial illiteracy, which affects roughly two-thirds of the world’s adults. Their gamified microlearning platform is white-labelled by financial institutions to deliver tailored education to their customers, free for the end user. Founded by David Giron and Javier Chan, it is already live in four markets with over 100,000 users.
Floow.ai helps care workers and other essential professionals gain formal qualifications on the job. Their mobile-first platform can shorten qualification paths by up to four times. Founded by Elise Spaan and Martin Zwart, it currently serves eight healthcare and education organisations across the Netherlands.
WUK makes culture accessible to every visitor, regardless of age, language or disability. Their AI-powered platform gives museums tools for translation, text-to-speech and adaptive content for blind, deaf and neurodiverse audiences. Founded by Louis Aerts with co-founders Thibault Bekaert, Jonas Hamerlinck and Ringo Deloof, WUK has signed 13 paying clients since launching in January 2025 and recently expanded into Finland.
