At 17, Davis Senior High School senior Dash Voskuhl built a caregiving startup called Tethr. He and his three co-founders apply to Y Combinator at the end of July.
(From press release) Dash Voskuhl spent his summer mornings knocking on doors around Davis, selling window cleaning. At one house, the pitch turned into a different conversation. Voskuhl mentioned the caregiving app he was building on the side, and the woman at the door, in her 50s, went quiet. Then she told him about her mother, who has dementia.
“That was the moment I knew I had to actually build this,” Voskuhl said.
Voskuhl, a rising senior at Davis Senior High School, is the CEO and co-founder of Tethr, a Davis startup whose app connects families with vetted caregivers so anyone can book care on demand, the way they’d order an Uber. The company is pre-launch, and this month the team is applying to Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley accelerator whose early bets included Airbnb and DoorDash.
The problem he is aiming at is enormous. About 63 million Americans, nearly 1 in 4 adults, now provide ongoing care for a family member, according to a 2025 report from AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving. That is 20 million more than a decade ago, and most of them are doing it on top of jobs and kids of their own, with little or no training. Professional in-home help exists, but for many families it is expensive and slow to arrange.
He has watched this up close, and for him it’s personal. His grandfather has Alzheimer’s disease, and watching his own family deal with the industry built to help them convinced him it was failing the people who depend on it.
The app itself is plain by design. You choose a time and select a caregiver from a local, background-checked list.
That’s it.
Much of the workforce will come from UC Davis. Tethr is recruiting pre-med and other pre-health students to do the visits. They get paid, and they log the patient-care hours that medical and nursing schools expect from applicants.
Most live a bike ride away from thousands of local families who need the help.
Voskuhl is joined by three other Davis high school students: Yousif Aladawi, Harvey Uyeyama, and Forte Dimidik.
Uyeyama is also Voskuhl’s best friend and his partner in an earlier venture, Harvey’s Coffee, and he was the one who told Voskuhl to stop talking about building something and build it.
Not every adult was as encouraging. Most of the older people in Voskuhl’s life told him to play it safe and wait until college. He wasn’t persuaded. The way he sees it, playing it safe is how the industry ended up where it is.
The next few weeks will decide a lot. The Y Combinator application is due at the end of July. The accelerator, based in San Francisco, invests $500,000 in each company it accepts and runs founders through three months of coaching that ends with a pitch to a room of investors. Historically, about 1 to 2 percent of applicants get in. An acceptance would mean money and mentorship. For four teenagers asking families to trust them with a parent’s care, it would also mean credibility, which is harder to come by.
If it goes the way Voskuhl plans, the first Tethr caregiver walks through a local front door this fall.
The waitlist is open now for families who need care and for the UC Davis students who want to provide it. Check out their website, https://jointethr.app/ to learn more or join the waitlist.
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