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Shadiyah Sigala and her co-founder, Brittany Barrett, were already seasoned tech entrepreneurs when they started Kinside, a platform that helps working parents find and search. Payment for child care. And they know that they can solve their own problems.
“We are parents and we feel the pain of child care every day,” Sigala says. “That was the inspiration for Kinside, combining our technology backgrounds with the fact that we are employers and we are parents.”
In the year Since its launch in 2020, Arm It serves more than 4,000 employers and their employees with access to a database of available child care providers, along with a technology transfer method to pay for it using dependent FSA dollars and other employer subsidies.
While the pandemic has set Kinside back “at least a year,” his team hasn’t lost their energy — or their desire to change the narrative around family-friendly benefits and workplaces.
You’ve founded technology companies in the past – what inspired you to venture into the childcare industry at Kinside?
So technology and child care are two supposedly different areas, and have been throughout history. But what if we could bring some of the best practices from technology to reorganize and reinvent and rethink industries and apply that to childcare?
Before Kinside, I founded another tech company called Honeybook, and while we were building it, I was the first woman on the team to get pregnant. I had to think about all our policies from the beginning A break from pay and other benefits, and cultural differences in how we want to support parents. I know that I have to model for the workers everything that I have done for myself. Within two years, we started childcare and it became clear that we weren’t providing that support for employees to get back into the office as much as helping them find childcare. When I went looking for child care benefits, I couldn’t find one that fit our needs.
What is missing from the market?
Child care providers They usually only serve very large companies, and we were a 100 person company. And by the way, they spend $4,000 a month. So Kinside’s point was to support the entire small and medium market.
Read more: The working parent crisis is getting worse – here’s how employers can creatively support their carers now
As an employee, you’ll get an array of benefits to help you find childcare right – we have openings for your age range, budget and neighborhood. You can then go ahead and seamlessly book and register your tour and continue paying the service provider for the duration. We also allow Pre-Tax Dependent Care FSAs to install the app. We recently raised $12 million in Series A funding from venture capitalists. So Silicon Valley understands that there is a great business to be built from a truly primitive industry.
Some of the things you’re describing seem to be how we learn to do many things, like finding a doctor or buying what we want. Why has child care taken so long to embrace the technological future?
Child care providers are very small and fragmented – there are 800,000 privately owned businesses and they are still operating mainly offline. When you go to check your child in, there is a paper clip check-in form, and you are paying them by check and cash. No one has been able to compile and create a record system. So we wanted to create amazing software for them to use and then share their space, which we sell through the employer marketplace.
In the year You launched Kinside in 2020 – how did COVID disrupt that launch?
We launched our marketplace in January 2020. And in March 2020, childcare wasn’t on the menu. But two things played in our favor: Things slowed down, but childcare wasn’t permanently closed. Childcare is not part of the public school system, which means they don’t have to follow the public school system. So most of the centers remained open; They had to drastically reduce their capacity.
Read more: Working parents need more than parental leave
We also accept that we may not be fully up to speed at this time. So we focused on the product and infrastructure to have partnerships with third-party administrators who facilitate FSAs for large insurance companies as employers prepare to take the plunge.
You are a business owner, CEO and also a lawyer for that matter. How is that playing out in Kinside and your day-to-day?
From day one, we built Kinside to be incredibly responsive to the needs of caregivers. Even as a startup, we offer 12 weeks of paid family leave. We also offer six weeks of paid sick leave or health leave, no claims, and childcare allowances Cost of child care.
I was a mother of two when I started this company. I knew exactly what I needed. Dividing work and life is not that difficult for me. And I won’t say the word. BalanceI’m saying it’s separation. That means when I quit, I stay quit. I don’t get tired and I don’t email, and I don’t treat or email my employees during off hours.
What advice do you have for other employers who want to support working parents?
Basically, every employer must provide paid family leave. Unfortunately, we live in a country where that is not supported by the government. But one step is to ensure that newborns and their parents have time to bond and heal, and that it includes all caregivers. Help employees and employers understand that providing care is difficult. It’s expensive and the logistics are a nightmare. So the last bucket is to provide financial assistance – this can be provided by a dependent care FSA or, if you can, provide subsidies.
Our sales are to show that employers are responsive. In the next phase, we want to reach 10,000 employers and one million parents. And I hope that we are re-examining our work values ​​in this country. We’re going to agree that we can get to a more balanced place than where we’ve been in the past few decades.
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