For Blake Robertson, the caregiving crisis is deeply personal. As a teenager, he witnessed firsthand his mother’s struggles after she became the primary caregiver of his grandfather after a cancer diagnosis.
“She had to step up and do more work at the family business,” said Robertson ’24 M.P.H. “She had to care for him. She had to drive him to the hospital back and forth. It put a huge strain on our family.”
Later, when he was in college, Robertson again had to reckon with the demands of caregiving. This time, he was the one who needed care. He developed a severe chronic illness and was left wheelchair bound for more than two years.
“That introduced me to America’s ‘safety net,’ which is a bit of a nightmare,” he said. “I found out there are a lot of resources out there. But finding out about them and accessing them is a really difficult thing.”
Luckily, Robertson was able to get the support he needed to continue living independently, and he got better. But he couldn’t forget how unnecessarily difficult it had been to obtain the social services available to individuals in need.
Today, he is helping make those resources more accessible through his company Keeper Systems (formerly known as Upkeep Care), an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that connects people to social services. It builds tools for finding and using a range of resources — including housing, transportation, and financial resources — for partner organizations, such as the United Way of Connecticut. Those tools (including AI assistants) can then be used by anyone seeking help.
“The broader problem we are trying to solve is that many social resources exist, but people have difficulty accessing them,” said Robertson, who is from Seabrook, Texas. Each year, he said, more than $140 billion in available social resources go unutilized because people either do not know these services exist or face barriers when trying to access them.
“We’re building AI tools that will empower enterprises that are already working in the space to be able to do this more efficiently and better.”
From problem to solution
Having to confront health issues in college made Robertson an expert at navigating social services, including overcoming hurdles to access disability benefits, transportation, and other resources.
Soon he wanted to share the lessons he’d learned with others. Ultimately, he applied to the Yale School of Public Health (YSPH), where he hoped to leverage his personal experience to improve caregiving. “I wanted to find a way to take the knowledge I had and put real solutions into the world,” he said.
As a Yale student, he began looking for solutions to the challenges he’d faced, but couldn’t find any. So, he started working on his own.
“I was throwing stuff at the wall, and nothing was sticking,” he said. “It took so much iteration, and I had to lean so much deeper into the problem.”
For an early iteration of Keeper Systems, he decided to focus specifically on older adults and their caregivers. Every day, 10,000 people turn 65 in the United States. Most of those people — 60% — say they want to stay in their homes and have someone care for them. While this can present a financial burden for family caregivers, Robertson thought it didn’t have to be that way.
In 2023, Robertson, along with classmates Kiley Pratt ’24 M.P.H., Wendy Jiang ’24 M.P.H., and Peter Yu ’24 M.S., started developing an AI assistant to help older adults and caregivers navigate resources specific to their struggles, such as transportation and respite care. The idea was to lessen the burden by giving them immediate, personalized support and guidance on all the available resources.
In April 2024, Robertson and the team pitched their idea at Startup Yale, a campus event that convenes the university’s top student entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and investors for a series of pitch competitions, workshops, and discussions.
Keeper beat out 36 teams to win the Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health or Education, a $25,000 prize for the best student-led venture focused on social innovation in health or education within underserved communities in the U.S. or low-resource countries. Keeper also won an additional $2,000 Audience Choice Award.
“I was able to present myself, my journey, and the ambition behind what I was doing,” Robertson remembers. “And it felt like people were taking a chance on me.”
Guiding every step
For Robertson, being part of Yale’s innovation ecosystem was essential to starting Keeper, from winning the Thorne Prize at Startup Yale to the mentorship of Kaakpema “KP” Yelpaala, an entrepreneur and public health practitioner who is now the faculty director of YSPH’s Future of Health Innovation Hub, an initiative that translates science into scalable solutions for healthier societies.
After graduating from Yale, Robertson continued his work on Keeper in New Haven. And it has continued to grow. Today, the startup serves anyone who needs help accessing social services, not just older adults.
A year ago, Keeper launched a pilot product, an AI assistant developed by Robertson and his team, which gives people access to personalized guidance for eligible resources from government, nonprofits, and local communities. The public-facing tool is synced up with the United Way of Connecticut’s vetted database of resources — such as housing, food assistance, and transportation — and trained on its operational protocols. Any cases that the AI assistant can’t resolve are escalated to a human.
But the technology is making remarkable advances. The AI assistant can be seen on the bottom right-hand corner of the United Way of Connecticut’s 211 website. When users click on “Ask 211,” they can chat with the AI assistant, helping them identify the root cause of their issues and suggesting resources on their eligibility. The AI assistant does more than help locate the resources; they also guide users through every step of accessing them.
“We’re not trying to replace human beings with this,” Robertson said. “But there are some things that AI is better than humans at, like retrieving tons of information. It can sort through it, find just the piece you need, and hand it over.”
Since its pilot product, Keeper has continued to gain momentum. Last year, it was recognized at the Yale Innovation Summit, placing third in the “Health Track.” More recently, Keeper was selected to join the inaugural batch of Elbow Grease, an AI accelerator run by Gutter Capital in New York City. The 8-week program provides first-check investment, one-on-one mentorship with successful founders, and workshops with industry leaders.
Moving forward, Robertson hopes to keep developing AI-powered tools for partner organizations like the United Way of Connecticut.
“Our broader vision is to use the power of AI to strengthen the connection between the social safety net and the people it’s meant to serve,” he said.
