When Dr Ben Maruthappu struggled to organise reliable care for his mother, the experience did more than frustrate him. It set the course for a company. A former NHS doctor, he founded Cera in 2016 to move healthcare out of hospitals and into people’s homes, and in under a decade he has built it into one of Europe’s fastest-growing healthcare companies.
That personal record of scaling an ambitious business has made him a finalist for The Cazenove Capital Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the 2026 Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards.
Care reimagined around technology
Maruthappu leads Cera as an AI-powered home healthcare company that delivers care on behalf of governments, the NHS and insurers. The company reports that its 12,000 carers and nurses carry out three million home visits a month across the country, greater in scale, it says, than all NHS accident and emergency attendances combined. At each visit, staff log patients’ symptoms digitally, building what the business describes as a world-leading healthcare dataset exceeding 300 billion data points.
That data underpins the innovation at the heart of Maruthappu’s model. According to Cera, its AI tools predict health risks up to seven days in advance with over 80 per cent accuracy, cutting falls by 20 per cent and hospitalisations by up to 70 per cent. The company says its preventative approach has saved the NHS and government more than one billion pounds to date, now around two million pounds a day, in a model it describes as far more affordable and more carbon-friendly than hospital care.
Building a workforce and a research engine
Under Maruthappu’s leadership Cera has also set out to grow the care workforce, reporting one million frontline applicants over two years and one million hours of training delivered, supported by productivity tools for staff. The company says it has secured more than 350 NHS and local government contracts with a 98 per cent renewal rate, and that it is the only care provider globally with its own robotics division. He has also launched what Cera calls the world’s first AI Lab for care and is drawing on the firm’s dataset to advance research for an ageing population with global life sciences partners.
A doctor turned entrepreneur
Maruthappu’s shift from medicine to entrepreneurship, taken despite no prior business experience, embodies what the entrepreneur category sets out to reward: visionary leadership applied to a market in urgent need of change. Finalists across the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards will hear the results at Grosvenor House, London on 10 November 2026.
