Peter Scutt's parents wanted to stay in their own home. That was all, and it turned out to be very hard to arrange.
Scutt went looking for the right home care and found a system built around agencies and phone calls. He has described the experience through the company he later founded: he struggled to find the right solution, and the struggle stayed with him. He was not a care worker or a policy expert. He was a son with a problem, and a friend and colleague, Tony Charara, who thought the problem could be fixed with software.
As Australia rolled out the NDIS and shifted aged care towards consumer-directed funding, people were handed budgets and told to choose.
The two started Better Caring in 2013, an online marketplace where older Australians and people with disability could find independent support workers directly. The platform was operating by 2014. Later they renamed it Mable, a name chosen to suggest freedom of choice and control, the thing Scutt's parents had wanted.
The timing mattered more than anyone could have planned. As Australia rolled out the NDIS and shifted aged care towards consumer-directed funding, people were handed budgets and told to choose. Many had no idea where to begin. Mable offered a list of workers with reviews, a way to book them, and lower prices because it skipped agency overheads. The company says it has delivered A$180 million in savings to customers since opening.
The money followed. In 2019 Ellerston Capital's JAADE Fund led a A$15 million round. In September 2021 General Atlantic led a A$100 million raise, and the Paralympic champion Dylan Alcott was among the backers. The company bought two NDIS businesses, Leapin and HomeMade, and by its tenth anniversary in October 2024 had made more than 200,000 connections and counted nearly 250 employees.
Then came scrutiny. The consumer regulator, the ACCC, found Mable had used unfair contract terms between November 2023 and August 2024, including a minimum A$5,000 penalty fee and automatic approval of service logs. Mable admitted the terms were unfair, changed its website and terms, and offered a court-enforceable undertaking. Reports in 2025 said the business, not yet profitable, was being shopped to buyers at a price near A$1 billion.
The lesson for a first-time founder is how plain the origin was. Mable began with a family inconvenience, not a market map. A marketplace is a promise of fairness to both sides, and the regulator's finding showed how quickly that promise can be tested once a platform gets big enough to write the rules.