Deborah Hanus was working towards a doctorate in artificial intelligence at Harvard when she saw how frustrating it was for friends to take paid or unpaid leaves from work. The amount of time and energy it took to navigate a complex web of federal and local regulations was too much.
So she quit Harvard and started building Sparrow.
By 2018 Hanus founded the San Francisco startup, and it was running by mid-2019.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $20 million Series A. Its lead investor was Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo; Authentic Ventures and South Park Commons also participated.
Over the past few years, Hanus has brought on a core founding team that includes CTO Samarth Keshava and Chief Revenue Officer Paul Park.
Sparrow simplifies the leave process for both employees and employers in a way that Hanus describes as being a "high-tech, high-touch" solution.
The company's main product streamlines all processes to make the experience a minimal one for employees and extremely simplified for employers who are increasingly managing highly distributed teams. And that potentially means a myriad of state and local regulations to deal with on top of federal laws.
“We really found that in a lot of ways it was more painful for HR teams to manage the process than even for employees just because there are so many moving pieces,” Hanus told me. “And as workforces are more and more distributed, the process is just getting more and more painful.”
Expert advisers are also on-hand to help clients on Sparrow's platform manage their teams or understand their benefits. Hanus wants to triple Sparrow's team, which currently sits around 60 employees.
Sparrow currently offers its services in the U.S. and Canada for both paid and unpaid leaves.
Under the Family and Medical Leave Act, private-sector workers at companies that employ more than 50 people are eligible to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. An item proposed in the now-dead Build Back Better bill would have given workers four weeks of guaranteed paid family and medical leave, and that was whittled down from 12 weeks.
California provides for eight weeks of paid leave for new parents, usually at 60% to 70% of salary; San Francisco's Paid Parental Leave Ordinance mandates most employers to make up the difference. Large employers frequently have their own programs providing paid leave.
But nationally, the U.S. is the only wealthy nation to not guarantee any sort of paid parental leave.
Another local startup is also tackling family and medical leave. Cocoon was founded in 2020 and has raised $26 million.
