Little Passports Inc., a San Francisco startup catering to early childhood education, on Thursday found itself under the umbrella of a growing new owner — New York-based BEGiN.
Little Passports was founded over a decade ago by Amy Norman and Stella Ma, who wanted to expose their own children to other cultures around the world and created a subscription service that provides monthly packages filled with hands-on activities built around global themes.
Norman grew up living between England and the U.S., and Ma grew up in Oakland. Norman likes to joke that she grew up on a 747 plane over the Atlantic and her experiences living in two countries as a kid colored her worldview as she quickly learned that other kids, on both sides of the ocean, knew very little about other countries.
"We as a globe are not doing enough to raise children who are curious about the world beyond their backyard," Norman said. "There was a real need for this."
Norman and Ma weren't looking to get acquired, but BEGiN reached out to them and the two teams met several times over many months. Eventually they decided it was a good fit. Terms weren't disclosed, but as part of the deal, Norman will get a seat on BEGiN's board and become president of the Little Passports division.
Little Passports has raised less than $6 million in funding over the past 12 years but the company has shipped over 10 million packages to date, Norman said. Norman and Ma bootstrapped the operation in its early days and tried to secure more funding but quickly hit a wall.
"In the early days, we did go out and look at raising venture," Norman said, noting that there was very little capital going to consumer brands and even less for children's enrichment. Female founders also get very little funding, too. "All of the odds were against us."
At the time, both Norman and Ma both had young children, including one on the way. While they were trying to raise funding, a male investor told them that "there was no way that two women with young children could possibly get a business off the ground," Norman told me. Investors of all genders would also eyeball them for wedding rings and ask intrusive questions about their marital status or family planning.
"These are not questions that men would get asked. Ever," Norman said.
But there was plenty of demand for their products.
So with very little funding, they learned to operate incredibly efficiently. And as working parents themselves, they recognized the need for a flexible working environment years before it became a trendy perk. As a result, they've run the company with a hybrid working structure from the start, allowing employees to work from home or the office.
"We knew that if you hire the right people, they will get the job done," Norman said. "I had a lot of personal tragedies in the year that we founded and I needed flexibility to be able to work and be a mom. I needed to be with an infant and 3-year-old at home. So I knew personally that a hybrid and flexible work environment would attract a lot of parents or people with any kind of caretaking responsibilities."
Little Passports currently has about 50 employees and the acquisition is going to allow the company to expand into more products including digital subscription services and buy-as-you-go products. The company also recently launched some products for sale in Target stores nationally.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but the startup was valued at more than $26 million after its last funding round in 2015, according to PitchBook. Its seed investors included several angel investors as well as Next Play Ventures, Golden Seeds, RimRock Venture Partners, Astia and GrowCo Capital.
This is BEGiN's third acquisition this year. In May, it announced that it would be buying codeSpark — a 7-year-old coding app for kids that's based in Pasadena — and in August it acquired New York-based KidPass, a subscription service founded in 2015 that lets parents book activities for kids. BEGiN is also the company behind Homer, a popular early education subscription program.
