The San Francisco company building modern workflow software for the child welfare system - so social workers spend less time on paperwork and more time finding kids a safe, loving family.
BINTI, INC. - The wordmark that now appears on the daily workspace of roughly 12,000 social workers across 36 states.
There are roughly 400,000 children in the United States foster care system, and never enough families ready to take them in. For decades, the work of matching those children with homes ran on paper packets, fax machines, and state databases built for auditors rather than caseworkers. Binti was founded in 2017 to change the tooling underneath that work.
The company builds cloud software that guides a social worker through the daily job: licensing foster and adoptive families, managing open cases, finding a child's relatives, coordinating services, and filing the federal reports that funding depends on. Today more than 550 agencies across 36 states and Washington, D.C. use it - a footprint that touches close to half of the children in care nationwide.
Binti's pitch is deliberately unshowy. It does not promise to fix child welfare. It promises to remove friction from the parts of the job that shouldn't require friction: the redundant data entry, the lost documents, the weeks a family waits to be approved. When agencies adopt it, they license about 80% more families in their first year, cut approval time by roughly 16%, and free up 20-40% of a caseworker's time.
That combination - a moral problem, a slow-moving government buyer, and measurable operational gains - has made Binti one of the more quietly durable companies in govtech, backed by Founders Fund, First Round Capital, and, as of 2026, Melinda French Gates' Pivotal Ventures.
"We're trying to be the first real software that isn't just for data entry, but actually helps you do your job."
Felicia Curcuru - Co-Founder & CEO, Binti
Binti's origin is personal. Co-founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru watched the emotional toll of the adoption process firsthand when her sister adopted two children. Around the same time she was volunteering as a court-appointed special advocate (CASA) for foster youth, and saw a nine-year-old she worked with placed in a group home simply because there weren't enough foster families available.
Before Binti, Curcuru was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company and the first employee at the online venture firm FundersClub, where she led user experience and business development. She co-founded Binti with Gabe Kopley, pairing a consultant's read on broken workflows with the conviction that the shortage of families was partly a tooling problem - and a solvable one.
Binti started with foster-family licensing and expanded, one module at a time, into a full workspace for child welfare agencies.
Turns paper approval packets into a guided online workflow, tracking every document and step to license families faster.
A caseworker's primary daily workspace to document, track, and manage children and family cases in one place.
Intelligent search and dynamic relationship mapping to identify and reach a child's kin, with outreach auto-logged as case notes.
Match children with appropriate available placements and track placement outcomes over time.
A closed-loop referral system with a Family of Origin Portal and FFPSA billing and claiming support.
Drafts forms, summarizes records, and cuts documentation burden - the newest line to cross $1M in ARR.
Source: Binti agency data // figures are averages and vary by agency
Maryland's 2025 Family Finding deployment: 4,500+ searches, 4,300+ kin connections identified, a 33% rise in kinship placement rate.
Binti sells subscription software to county and state child-welfare agencies, statewide systems, and private foster and adoption providers - a business-to-government model in a market most startups avoid because of procurement friction. Binti leaned into that friction rather than around it.
Its earliest products were priced below common RFP thresholds, so agencies could buy without a lengthy bidding process. The company built a base of county-level references, then used those results to win statewide contracts, and worked through reseller partnerships to scale procurement. It holds an active federal GSA contract running through 2040.
The result is a company reporting six product lines each past $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with roughly 12,000 social workers using the platform daily. Where it fits in the market: an alternative to legacy state CCWIS/SACWIS systems and traditional government IT integrators, competing with human-services vendors such as Northwoods, Casebook, and FEi/GCOM - but positioned as caseworker-first software rather than a compliance database.
That positioning is also its moat. Because adoption is driven from the bottom up by the people using it every day, switching costs are high and expansion within an agency tends to compound - licensing leads to case management leads to family finding leads to AI.
Felicia Curcuru and Gabe Kopley launch in San Francisco with software to digitize foster and adoptive family licensing.
Early backers including First Round and Founders Fund fund the agency-footprint expansion.
A large round from Founders Fund, Michael Dell, and Lachy Groom fuels expansion beyond licensing.
Intelligent search and relationship mapping help agencies find and engage children's kin.
A closed-loop referral system and Family of Origin Portal support FFPSA prevention and claiming.
The AI package ships; Maryland's Family Finding deployment lifts kinship placements 33%.
Melinda French Gates' firm backs Binti as six product lines each pass $1M ARR.
Every product decision is filtered through outcomes for children in care.
Rank ideas on merit, not seniority - and share data across teams.
Treat procurement friction and legacy systems as problems to route around.
Sit with social workers; build around the pain they actually feel.
Give caseworkers and families the data to act, not just to comply.
Remote-friendly team of ~90 treated as owners, with an emphasis on psychological safety.
Binti builds cloud software for child welfare - helping agencies license foster and adoptive families, manage cases, find kin, coordinate service referrals, and meet federal reporting requirements.
County and state child-welfare agencies, statewide systems, and private foster/adoption providers - 550+ agencies across 36 states plus D.C., with about 12,000 social workers using it daily.
Felicia Curcuru (CEO) and Gabe Kopley founded Binti in 2017 in San Francisco.
Over $60M, including a $10M Series A (2019), a $45M Series B (2021), and a $3M strategic investment from Pivotal Ventures in 2026.
Agencies license about 80% more families in their first year, cut time to approve by ~16%, and save 20-40% of social-worker time; Maryland saw a 33% rise in kinship placements.