Some people cannot reach their family any more.
Not because nobody is trying. Because the way families keep in touch moved onto a device they were never going to use.
Family life moved to a screen they do not hold.
Almost every photograph a family takes now lives in a group chat or a feed. If you cannot work the phone, all of it goes past you. Your grandchildren are growing up in an app you cannot open.
The families are not absent. They are posting constantly, to each other. The one person who would most like to see it is the one the thread does not reach.
Every workaround asks the wrong person to change: learn the app, hold the tablet, remember the password.
The loss is not company. It is the ordinary news: the haircut, the school uniform, the dog that turned up.
Every family has a reason it does not work.
None of these families is careless. Every one has someone falling out of the bottom.
Nan has never had a smartphone
Ninety-one, sharp as anything. Every photo of her great-grandchildren has been sent somewhere she cannot go.
A four-year-old and an eighty-year-old
One is too young for a phone, the other cannot work one. The technology skips them both.
The iPad everyone bought her
It was going to solve this. It is in the drawer with a flat battery.
Somebody is always asleep
Perth, Glasgow, Toronto. A video call means somebody is up at three, so it happens on birthdays and not on Tuesdays.
Dad is not on Facebook
He is not going to be, either. The family album lives somewhere he has decided not to go.
Nobody knows if it landed
You send a photo into the thread and hear nothing. After a while you stop sending.
Put it on the screen they already use, and make it worth watching.
Residents already had televisions. Families already had phones. The gap was never the technology, it was who was being asked to adapt.
So the effort sits with the side that has a phone in hand all day, and the other side has one button. What arrives is a channel of their own family, laid out to sit down in front of, not an alert that pings and vanishes.
It started with a television and a feeling.
The idea came from watching older relatives in care: sharp, present, and still outside the everyday closeness of family life.
We launched on Foxtel Business iQ in Australia and expanded to the UK with Scottish Care.
We are a small team, working with providers and families who want their parents thought of on an ordinary Tuesday.
As featured in
“Seeing someone you know, love or are familiar with makes you feel comfortable and at home… TeaTime is a powerful bridge to family and social connection.”Jimmy Leishman, Co-Founder & CEO. Australian Ageing Agenda, Winter 2026
The founders.
Jimmy Leishman
A firefighter before co-founding TeaTime. He came to the idea through his own family and leads partnerships and strategy.
Edward Trick
Ed leads the financial and operational side. Before TeaTime he worked in corporate finance and venture investment across Australia and the UK.
What we do not trade away.
Residents first, always
Does this make the resident’s life better? Not easier to sell. Better for the person in the room.
The hard part is making it simple
Our hardest engineering problems are about removing steps.
Built with care communities, not just for them
What operators, families and residents tell us shapes what we build next.
Post something today. She’ll have it forever.
Setting up takes two minutes. Posting takes as long as a text.
No card needed. Works on the TV they already have.