Despite broader economic uncertainties about a recession, a child care startup based in San Francisco has tripled its customer base over the past three months.
Kinside is building a marketplace to connect parents with child care providers through employer benefits programs, and it now has 9,000 employers on its platform, an increase from 3,000 in early June.
Co-founder and CEO Shadiah Sigala attributes the success to a growing demand for child care that exploded during the pandemic, as well as the company's own strong business development strategy.
"We've been very steady and focused for years and the fruits are paying off," Sigala told me.
She attributes a lot of that success to the company's efforts on building partnerships with other third-party benefits providers which makes the company's product more visible to potential customers.
It has allowed Kinside to essentially "skip a step" and get right in front of employers that are looking to provide more benefits to their employees, she said.
"We're now seeing these long relationships that we were fostering come to life," Sigala said, adding that Kinside also "got really good at making our benefit portable and easy to distribute, and that isn't going away."
While Kinside hasn't been unaffected by the broader economic downturn — sales have felt the crunch — Sigala told me that its long-term business development pipeline is very strong.
Every partnership the company signs gets it in front of thousands of more employers, and that will continue over the next year, she said.
One of its partners is Urban Sitter, a San Francisco startup that connects families to in-home child care services. Kinside's marketplace helps parents find openings at child care centers, and the two companies have teamed up on pitching both services to customers.
The company also recently acquired a Seattle-based child care enrollment and scheduling service called LegUp.
Kinside isn't disclosing exactly how many parents are using its services, but Sigala said they estimate that 20% to 30% of their customers' workforces have young children and might need child care services.
The company announced a $12 million Series A round in June that was led by Wellington Ventures and included Magnify Ventures, Initialized Capital and Maven Ventures, bringing its total funding to $16 million.
In the U.S., child care has been an underserved need for decades. On average, the government spends $500 annually per child up to 2 years old for early child care, according to a 2021 report from the New York Times. In comparison, Israel spends more than $3,000 per child and Norway spends around $30,000.
