New profitable EIS exit for Haatch: young entrepreneur’s global business CareLineLive

Haatch has announced the profitable cash sale of its stake in CareLineLive to Accel-KKR, a leading specialist investor in enterprise software and tech-enabled businesses.

CareLineLive has created cloud-based management software for home-care agencies.

This is the third profitable exit in as many months for the EIS and SEIS fund manager (read about Haatch’s 7.4x exit of Native Teams and 6.55x exit of Re-flow). Past performance is not a guide to the future. There have also been failures.

This latest exit is expected to deliver a total return of 1.34x (before tax relief) to some investors in the Haatch EIS Fund, Wealth Club investors among them.

Growing up wheelchair-bound, founder Josh Hough was told by doctors he might not be able to have a job. But as a young entrepreneur he set up and bootstrapped businesses.

CareLineLive launched in 2018. It now serves 650 clients in seven countries, generating revenues of over £3.5 million; helping 25,000 carers deliver better care and home care companies improve operations and regulatory compliance.

What has been the founder’s journey and the company’s trajectory so far? How has Haatch EIS supported CareLineLive’s growth? Why did Haatch invest and how might you invest in similar companies?

Growing up with a rare muscular illness that often confined him to a wheelchair, Josh Hough was constantly visited by doctors, nurses and other healthcare givers. “Every time I met someone new, I had to go through the same routine – answering the same questions, explaining my condition. It was very repetitive and boring,” he recalls, “Meanwhile, they were filling out paperwork or leafing through thick folders of information. It wasn’t very efficient and even as a child, I was thinking: ‘this could be done better’.”

The opportunity to create a solution like CareLineLive would come later.

Josh became an entrepreneur at 14, when he set up a publishing company with his sister. A few years later, in 2010, he started his own IT services company MAS Design Ltd. The MAS Group now operates businesses within the IT, software, and telecoms industry – including CareLineLive.

Josh pinpoints what compelled him to build CareLineLive: “My grandfather was receiving care and the family struggled with the lack of communication from carers. Everything I felt and saw as a child came flooding back. I just felt there needed to be a better system and, ultimately, that I had to be the one to create it.”

Whilst helping a MAS client in the home care sector create a paperless system, Josh’s team developed an app that would go on to become CareLineLive, an all-in-one solution for home care companies.

It’s reported customers of the cloud-based system have seen improved cash flow and increased revenues by up to 50%.

Josh set up CareLineLive with a grant in 2014, and used credit cards and personal loans to keep the company going during the early stages.

Haatch EIS led the company’s funding round in 2021 to help accelerate its expansion into international markets – by this time, CareLineLive already had clients in Ireland, Australia, Malta and Zimbabwe – and help continue building out the platform.

Haatch invested because it deemed the company to be at an exciting stage of its growth, with a compelling offering and vision to improve homecare. The global pandemic had considerably increased demand for homecare of the elderly and vulnerable – making CareLineLive’s technology mission-critical, in Haatch’s view. The manager saw significant promise, hailing the CareLineLive team as “just getting started in terms of its potential.”

Haatch is headed by four partners: entrepreneurs with a history of profitable personal exits, who seek to back entrepreneurs – like Josh – who are building disruptive digital businesses. The team aims to bring its significant experience to add value and provide hands-on support to propel portfolio companies’ growth – in this instance, potentially helping make CareLineLive attractive to a global technology investor like Accel-KKR.

The Haatch EIS is open for investment. The current tranche targets deployment in the 2025/26 tax year (not guaranteed) and you can invest online.

This means you should be able to claim up to 30% income tax in the current tax year or carry back to 2024/25. Tax rules can change and benefits depend on circumstances.

To date, the fund has invested £13.8 million in 49 companies. Of this, £1.8 million has been returned to investors, with a remaining portfolio balance of £20.2 million (February 2025). Past performance is not a guide to the future.

Haatch EIS targets a return of 3x over a planned holding period of five to ten years – high risk and not guaranteed.