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When James Whitelaw tried to help his parents-in-law navigate Australia's aged care system in 2017, he not only stumbled on a business opportunity, but he also found a mess.
Nine years later, the company Whitelaw later founded, Trilogy Care, operates the country's second-largest in-home aged care provider by government funding, with annual funds under management topping $500 million.
The Brisbane-based accountant watched as his parents-in-law, Peter and Inese, like hundreds of thousands of older Australians, struggled with a system that took their government-funded Home Care Package and filtered it through layers of administration fees, care management charges and opaque pricing structures.
By the time the money reached actual care, a sizeable chunk had evaporated.
For Inese, who was in the early stages of dementia, the lack of continuity and limited hours simply wasn’t good enough.
Turning to self-managed care, which was a niche market segment at the time, the family managed to double their weekly support hours from a few simple tweaks to their management.
They were able to choose local carers to assist them on their rural property just outside Cairns, and they could negotiate prices directly with those carers instead of being subject to set prices from a fully managed aged care provider.
“We went from 5.5 to 12 hours of care a week, with people they knew and trusted,” says Whitelaw who founded Trilogy Care in 2020 with a deceptively simple premise.
The bean-counter’s reasoning was: what if older Australians could manage their own care packages, keep their own carers and pay dramatically lower fees to do it?
That premise has turned into a remarkable growth story in the Australian aged care sector for Trilogy Care.
The company is now the country's second-largest in-home aged care provider by government funding, overtaking UnitingCare Queensland last year.
Annual funds under management of more than $500 million is up from $340 million in FY25, according to KPMG’s latest aged car market analysis.
This compares with market leader Australian Unity which had $721 million in funds under management in FY25.
Trilogy Care now services almost 15,000 active clients, with that figure growing by around a thousand new clients a month following the introduction of Support at Home in November 2025.
The company has doubled its staff over the past 12 months to cater for that demand.
A 'significant disruptor' in the home care market
The KPMG aged care market analysis released this year describes Trilogy Care as "one of the most significant disruptors in the home care market", noting the company has achieved a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 215 per cent since launching - dwarfing the industry-wide CAGR of 22 per cent by 193 percentage points.
Putting that growth into perspective, the KPMG data shows that Trilogy Care received zero government funding in FY19 and FY20.
In FY21, its first full year of operation, it received $1.1 million and by FY25, that figure had ballooned to $340 million, giving the company a 3.4 per cent share of the national home care market.
The business launched just as the COVID-19 pandemic forced much of the world into lockdown, which Whitelaw says gave care recipients and their families time to review exactly how many hours of home care they were receiving from their federally funded packages.
“I think that was when people really sat down and looked at some of the inefficiencies built into the traditional model of in-home care and began to realise they could get more value through self-management,” he says.
Having invested heavily in technology, including building an operating system to manage government funding and pay service providers, Whitelaw says the business was able to scale quickly and support a rapidly expanding client list.
To understand how Trilogy Care grew so fast, it helps to understand what it decided not to do.
The traditional model in Australian home care is "fully managed" where the provider assigns a care manager, selects the support workers, schedules the visits and charges a suite of fees for the privilege. The client has limited say over who walks through their door.
Whitelaw built Trilogy Care around the opposite approach.
Under its self-managed model, clients choose their own carers, set their own schedules and decide how their funding is spent.
Trilogy Care handles the regulatory compliance, payment processing and administrative scaffolding, but charges significantly lower fees than fully managed providers.
“One of the most common complaints we hear from people who have moved from another full-service provider is that they were seeing a different person every week,” says Whitlaw.
“It’s hard to underscore just how important it is for many older Australians to receive consistent care from people they know and trust.”
A deep well of frustration
This approach tapped into a deep well of frustration.
Australia's aged care system has been under sustained scrutiny since the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety delivered its final report in 2021, documenting systemic failures in care quality, workforce conditions and financial transparency.
Home care, in particular, has been growing at a staggering pace as government policy shifts toward keeping older Australians in their homes rather than moving them into residential facilities.
Home Care Package funding hit $9.9 billion in FY25, having grown at a CAGR of 24 per cent since FY18. The broader aged care sector consumed $39.2 billion in government funding in FY25, up 9.6 per cent on the prior year.
Demand is only accelerating. Projections suggest roughly 1.82 million Australians will require home care by 2044.
The pressure is already acute. At the end of FY25, 96,709 people were waiting for a Home Care Package at their approved level, a 41 per cent jump year-on-year.
Into that surging demand stepped the federal government's Support at Home program, which replaced the Home Care Packages Program on 1 November 2025.
The new program was designed to simplify the system, but its rollout has also turbocharged Trilogy Care's growth which has also been aided by high profile ambassadors such as Australian Test cricketing great Allan Border and beloved actor and advocate Paula Duncan.
“It’s been a once-in-a-generation opportunity for business growth, with the government finally expanding the number of packages available for funded in-home care,” says Trilogy Care CEO Luke Traini, who stepped into the top job at the end of 2024.
“But pensioners were hit really hard by the aged care reforms at the end of last year. A lot of people now need to make contribution payments for non-clinical care such as cleaning and assistance showering.
“And on top of that, there were price hikes across the entire industry because of the new rules. It’s led to a surge of interest in self-managed care due to its relative affordability.”
Since Traini’s appointment as CEO, Whitlaw has stepped away from the day-to-day running of the business but his passion for the mission has not waned.
These days he spends much of his time as chairman on the Trilogy Care Foundation - a not-for-profit arm dedicated to improving aged care services in regional areas of Australia.
“We’ve helped a lot of communities in rural and remote areas put a self-managed overlay into their towns, and connected locals in search of part-time work with older Australians needing in-home support,” says Whitlaw.
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