In conversation with elyndra’s Founder Marcus Williamson

Outward recently led the £1.1m funding round in the company and you can read more about our investment thesis here. For now, let’s hear from the founder himself.

We’re facing a once-in-a-generation demographic, health, and cultural shift that’s transforming how developed societies care for their people. The aging population, advances in medicine and technology, higher survival rates at birth and after accidents, and growing mental health needs among youth are all driving up demand for care. Meanwhile, the supply of care is shrinking—a perfect storm.

What makes social care unique is that it’s inherently people-focused. Unlike acute medical interventions, it unfolds over a lifetime. It’s social. It’s emotional. It’s about relationships and trust. The systems designed to manage it often don’t reflect that reality. The removal of overseas workers, for example, has driven up costs, created staffing inefficiencies, and increased turnover. And at every level—from national policy to how frontline teams communicate—poor information flow compounds the problem. Poor referral processes alone can cost providers £500-1000 per day in vacant bed losses, while local authorities struggle to place vulnerable children quickly and safely.

elyndra exists to bring meaningful innovation to this space—for both those receiving care and those providing it. Through our strategic partnership with Tristone Group, we’re proving that AI can solve real operational challenges, starting in children’s residential care.

• Bridge – A Referrals Management System: transforming how children’s residential care referrals are processed by using AI to analyse referral documents, extract key data, and identify critical factors for placement decisions. Instead of care managers spending hours manually reviewing 20+ page referral documents, Bridge processes them in seconds, highlighting risk and protective factors, care needs, and coaching managers through the compatibility with their specific homes. We’re preventing vacant bed losses worth £500-1000 per day while helping local authorities place children faster and more safely.
• Echo – AI Note-taker: Our AI-powered note-taking tool turns 30-second voice notes into complete, compliant documentation, helping care staff focus on relationships rather than paperwork.
• Sage – Learning Management System: We help teams generate personalised compliant training from internal policy documents, turning 96-page PDFs into bite-sized, mobile-friendly lessons. This ensures staff stay compliant with regulations while reducing L&D admin burden by 80%.
• Soar – Analytics system: Our risk detection system provides early warning indicators for Ofsted compliance, tracking incidents, stability metrics, and regulatory notifications. This gives registered managers, operators and care portfolio managers board-ready data access and helps prevent regulatory issues before they escalate.

I want elyndra to prove that technology doesn’t replace human care—it enhances it. This sector is often seen as technophobic, but we’re setting a new standard by showing that tech, applied thoughtfully and respectfully, can amplify the good work carers already do. Most importantly, it helps them return to the work they care most about: caring for people—not wrestling with systems and screens.

I’d ask them to spend time in and around the care system. See what carers go through. See how their work touches lives. And imagine what it would feel like to grow old and rely on social care themselves. My hope would be that they gain a personal understanding of the environment and what they’d want from it—because that’s how real change begins.

My family runs care homes, so I’ve been immersed in the sector since I was young—from catastrophic injury recovery to children’s care. That background gave me a deep understanding of care’s human complexity. But I was also drawn to maths and technology—I loved playing with computers and eventually ended up in a finance role. What brought me back was my fascination with systems and patterns—how you can find meaning and signal in messy data.

As I began experimenting with early language models, I realized you could do arithmetic on context, on words. That’s when elyndra started taking shape. Care is full of stories, nuance, and emotional subtext. This is where I’m meant to be—at the intersection of care and technology.

We’re a small, mostly remote team—four people in London and a few contractors abroad. Communication is key. We’re honest and direct with one another, which is essential in a space where we’re constantly testing and iterating. We question assumptions, especially the ones baked into legacy systems: “Why is this done this way?” “What’s the actual job to be done here?”

Everyone’s encouraged to investigate independently and come back with clear insights. We value speed of learning over speed of execution. When we hit roadblocks, we adapt—whether that’s tweaking our process or finding better tools.

It’s a close-knit team focused on moving fast, learning deeply, and solving real problems.

I grew up watching my dad build businesses. It felt normal to create things. I saw him move from engineering into care, and I saw the real-world impact of that work. I was curious and always tinkering—buying and selling things online, moving from one hustle to the next throughout school and university.

Money has always, to some degree, come second and been seen very much as a token of resource to gather access to more things and get people working with me.

My sixth-form maths teacher, Dr. Sutcliffe, taught me the value of work ethic. I found school challenging and was told I might not pass GCSE maths. But he didn’t compare me to others—he just showed me that if I worked hard, I could improve faster and outwork my peers. That lesson stayed with me.

It taught me that being behind isn’t a permanent condition—it’s a mindset and effort problem. I not only passed GCSE maths, but went on to study it at university. That experience made me believe that with the right approach, you can craft the outcomes you want, no matter where you start.