This serial founder built a voice AI agent for older adults

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Good morning. This week’s founder story highlights what’s possible when you set out to solve a problem that’s close to your heart – and that supports a broader macro issue in the market. 

This one’s a special issue. Let’s dive in.

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Igor Gurovich has spent the past decade building a string of consumer tech companies, with one exit. He grew an EdTech company for emerging markets from zero to $12 million in revenue in under two years and co-founded a healthcare company for doctors which he scaled to $1.2 million in a year. 

Gurovich comes from a long lineage of doctors and was enamored by his brilliant psychiatrist grandfather who worked until he was 90. But when he finally stopped working, he declined shockingly fast. Gurovich watched the technology at the time fail his grandfather and the only thing that still worked was the phone. “The experience convinced me that the next great consumer products have to be built for older adults, through the interface that actually works for them: voice.” 

Callie Care is an AgeTech startup building a phone-first voice AI that automatically calls seniors helping them fight isolation and cognitive decline. It works over a normal phone call, including landlines. No app, device or set-up required. Callie handles the practical parts of daily life by voice: booking rides, ordering groceries, managing medications and appointments, daily check-ins, and companionship – all of the tasks Gurovich’s mother used to do for his grandfather. 

Callie Care is founder-built. Their CTO writes all the production code. He was the CTO of inDrive, a global ride-hailing unicorn, where he built high-load systems for millions of users and wrote the original iPS app with 40M+ downloads. As the CPO, Gurovich leads product, the conversation design and their growth engine – using Cursor, Claude Code and Lovable for prototyping, prompting, and product logic. 

Callie launched in October 2025 as a daily companion-calling service. The team ran more than 10,000 conversations in that phase, which gave them a rich dataset for understanding this audience and their real problems. But they didn’t monetize. 

Gurovich realized people pay to get things done, not to chat. In mid-April 2026, they pivoted to a concierge model, starting with the job seniors needed most: transportation. The hard part in this market is reaching older adults profitably, but they’ve seen seniors subscribe and pay on their own. 

“The unexpected part is how deep power users go: one member took 27 rides in a month, another replaced both her car and her driving daughter with 30 rides across 19 places, and one rides to dialysis every week without a single missed trip,” he said. They’ve just started marketing to the adult children buying Callie for a parent. 

The business model has three layers: 

“We're not profitable as a company yet, and that's expected at this stage. What matters is that the underlying economics work. By our current math, gross-profit payback on a member is on the order of three months, and we're confident the model is profitable at the scale of our vision,” Gurovich said. 

In terms of scaling strategies, Callie’s main marketing channels are Meta and word-of-mouth. 

“We've managed to hack acquisition there and bring customers in cheaply, which is genuinely hard in this demographic, and that's our primary engine right now. On top of that, referrals are becoming a real source: happy members and their families bring in others. We've kept paid growth measured while we sharpen the product, and as the economics support it, scaling that engine is what we'll pour fuel on.” 

When asked if building in AgeTech is difficult, Gurovich said they overcame that by taking technology out of the equation. 

“Callie works on the ordinary phone they already answer. The deeper trust comes from care, not tech. We're not a transactional dispatch service. We follow up: we call after a ride to check it went well, we check in after a grocery order, we remind, we stay in touch,” he explained. 

“For recurring needs, like a standing weekly dialysis ride, we coordinate everything end-to-end and proactively remind by call and text, so nothing depends on the senior remembering to ask. Today, that's rides and groceries; medication management is still in development. And if a member goes quiet or something in a call sounds off, Callie escalates to the family. So, it's proactive outreach plus recurring coordination plus family escalation, not silent autonomous action behind the person's back.” 

Gurovich said the biggest challenge is the market. 

“The US healthcare system is extraordinarily tangled and fragmented, and that makes distribution and go-to-market the hardest problem for a company like ours: figuring out who pays, through which program, under which rules.” 

The opportunity, however, is timing. “Voice AI is finally good enough for an older adult on an ordinary phone to actually get things done, right as the 65+ population crosses 61 million toward 73 million by 2030 and the care system runs short of both money and caregivers,” he concluded.

If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.

Speak soon,
Amanda

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