Childcare Benefits Company Kinside Raises $3 Million In Funding

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 13, 2019
  • Kinside, a company that is aiming to help parents utilize care benefits and find providers for kids, announced it raised $3 million

Kinside — a company that is aiming to help parents utilize family care benefits and find providers for kids — announced it has raised $3 million round of funding led by Initialized Capital.

Ever since Kinside launched 18 months ago, the company has raised a total of $4 million. Some of the company’s other investors include Precursor Ventures, Kairos, Jane VC and Escondido Ventures.

Kinside was founded by Shadiah Sigala, Brittney Barrett, and Abe Han. And Kinside participated in the Y Combinator startup accelerator.

“Getting meetings with employers has not been the hard part,” said Sigala via TechCrunch. “Any subject line that says ‘do you want childcare for your employees?’ immediately gets a response. We hit a nerve there and when we talked with them, we found that the biggest pain they expressed was that their employees were having a hard time finding childcare.”

One of the biggest problems with the US is that it is the only industrialized country without a national law that guarantees paid parental leave. So major corporations are offering family benefits to retain talent.

Sigala pointed out that 43% of women in the professional sector will leave the workforce within one to two years of having a baby largely due to the lack of childcare support.

Prior to launching Kinside, Sigala co-founded Honeybook. And when she became pregnant, Sigala started developing the company’s benefit policies.

While at Y Combinator, Kinside focused on streamlining the process of using dependent care flexible spending accounts or pre-tax benefits for caregiving costs after the founders saw that the complicated claims process meant that only a fraction of parents would be able to use the program.

Initially, Kinside started out in private beta with 10 clients. And over the past year, the company signed up over 1,000 employers.