Why Caralto exists

I'm 47 years old. For twenty of those years, I cared for my grandparents. Not on the side — I was the one who knew everything. Which medications, which diagnoses, which doctor, which appointment, what they wanted and what they didn't. From the summer of 2022 I prepared their pills as long as they lived at home, I sat in on their examinations, I held power of attorney. My grandparents were like second parents to me, and I was like a fourth child to them.

I also know caregiving from the other side: I'm a trained geriatric therapist, I worked as a care assistant in a nursing home, and together with my partner I ran our own care service. And yet — this is the point — the real problem was never the caregiving itself. It was that all the knowledge sat with a single person. With me.

When my grandfather died suddenly at the end of 2022, someone else reached him first — and didn't know he had an advance directive, that he did not want to be resuscitated. No one knew about my grandparents' funeral arrangements.

When my grandmother was taken to hospital with severe cardiac arrhythmia, three forms of dementia were diagnosed there; afterwards she moved into a nursing home. Doctors and nurses asked questions no one but me could answer — which diagnoses, which medications, what she wanted. When my mother was once supposed to take my grandmother to the eye doctor, she simply said: "But I have no idea which medications she takes." Not out of indifference — the knowledge was never shareable.

So I was always there. I went to the appointments, I kept an eye on the costs — what the home cost, which aids my grandmother had and why. What the others knew, they knew because I told them. Again and again, to each one, individually. Even the phone calls with my mother were almost entirely about my grandmother, the home, the logistics — rarely about us as people.

Not everything was a burden. My son, now 19, supported us from the age of 16: after my grandfather's death he went for walks with his great-grandmother, accompanied her to the cemetery and visited her in the home almost every week — sometimes with me, sometimes alone. He talked with her and played with her.

And still, I was never allowed to drop out. That lasted until my grandmother's death in January 2026 — and on that day I organized everything again: the funeral director, the bank, later the division of the estate.

Only months later, when things grew quieter, did I understand what had been going wrong the whole time. It always rested on one set of shoulders — not because others didn't want to help or couldn't, but because there was no tool that brings everyone to the same level of knowledge.

That's exactly why I built Caralto. Medication, appointments, diagnoses, costs, emergency data, documents — in one place, visible to everyone who helps. No one has to tell, copy and forward everything over and over so the family knows. Tasks can be shared, and the emergency profile brings a person's wishes to where they're needed: to whoever is there at that moment.

So that the person who carries the most is also allowed to be ill once in a while. Or to go on holiday. And so that there's room again on the phone for everything else that makes up a family — not only for the logistics.

Carrying care together — that's not just our phrase. It's what I missed for twenty years.

— Founder of Caralto