The most revealing moment in CorporateCARE Solutions' business does not happen in a boardroom. It happens before breakfast, when a sitter cancels, a child wakes with a fever or an aging parent suddenly needs company. An employee looks at the clock. Their regular care arrangement has failed, the workday has not, and paid time off is about to become emergency care time. CorporateCARE exists for that thin, anxious slice of the morning.
The Tucson company sells employers access to backup child, adult and elder care across the United States. Employees can ask for help through a mobile app, website or phone. The platform sends the request into a network of vetted care providers, keeps the family updated and gives the employer a view of usage and spending. Care can happen in an employee's home, at a loved one's home in another state or even at a hotel during a work trip.
That sounds like a care marketplace, and partly it is. It is also an HR benefit, a scheduling engine, a reimbursement system and a national service operation. The useful distinction is that the buyer is the employer while the lived experience belongs to a worker and family. CorporateCARE has to satisfy both without making a difficult morning feel like an enterprise-software rollout.
A bill built for the emergency
CorporateCARE's sharpest argument is financial. Traditional backup-care contracts can ask companies to buy a pool of care in advance, whether employees use it or not. CorporateCARE instead promotes pay-as-you-go hourly or daily billing, with no annual prepayment for utilization and no minimum usage requirement. If nobody uses care in a month, its employer FAQ says there is no utilization bill for that month.
The model matters because backup care is uncertain by design. A company knows disruptions will happen, but not precisely who will need four hours on a Tuesday, who will need a full day during a school closure, or whose parent will need support 1,000 miles away. CorporateCARE says three quarters of its 2024 care requests lasted four to ten hours. That range is almost a miniature business case for metered billing.
The request-duration figure comes from CorporateCARE's 2024 user data. Fulfillment is a dated company-reported measure, not a current service guarantee.
Flexibility continues on the supply side. The company can fill a request through its provider network, but its trademarked My Choice program allows employees to use a caregiver or care center they already know, with CorporateCARE handling the reimbursement workflow. That feature is easy to underestimate. Care is unusually sensitive to familiarity: a family may prefer the neighbor their child trusts or the center an older parent already knows over a stranger with a perfect digital profile.
“I've walked in the shoes of nearly every person we serve.”Sharon Lurtsema, founder and CEO
The founder has held every clipboard
Sharon Lurtsema's résumé explains why the product pays attention to the handoffs. She worked as a nanny in New York, returned to Tucson and built a local child-and-adult-care agency from a bedroom in her father's house. She later became a staffing coordinator, agency owner and technology developer. Her company biography also describes her as a working parent and breast-cancer survivor. In other words, she has seen the care system as provider, dispatcher, employer and person in need.
LinkedIn lists CorporateCARE as founded in 2011. A 2021 profile describes the national service launching in 2014, the same year Lurtsema received a workplace-innovation award from the Society for Human Resource Management of Greater Tucson. The sequence matters more than the neatness of a single anniversary: first came decades of care work, then the effort to turn those operating lessons into national infrastructure.
Company materials call one provider-broadcast feature “Go Fish,” a playful name for a stressful operation. The larger platform connects employees, care providers, caregivers, employers and CorporateCARE itself. Requests can be submitted in under a minute, profiles and photos can travel with a match, notifications arrive during staffing, and financial transactions move through the same system. A 2023 upgrade added reporting and workflow improvements and moved the platform to Amazon Web Services.
Lurtsema has called this the “Uberization” of backup care. The comparison is imperfect - care carries more trust, context and consequence than a ride across town - but the operational ambition is clear. Make demand visible quickly. Reach the available network. Tell everyone what is happening. Remove phone-tag from the critical path.
The family benefit keeps acquiring rooms
Children and adult dependents remain the foundation, but CorporateCARE has expanded its definition of the care problem. Pet care covers walking, sitting and boarding. Tutoring support lets families seek academic help, an offering the company pushed during pandemic-era school disruption through a relationship with Sylvan Learning. Adult care is deliberately broader than “elder care”: the person receiving support can be a spouse, partner or any dependent adult, including someone with special or neurodivergent needs.
In 2025, a collaboration with global concierge provider Aspire Lifestyles added MyLife Concierge. Employees can ask for help researching services, coordinating medical appointments, planning travel, finding a contractor, organizing college applications or arranging a meal delivery for an older relative. The concierge does not turn every errand into free goods; it supplies the research and coordination layer. Its strategic purpose is to absorb the small administrative tasks that migrate into working hours.
Child and adult backup care when the regular arrangement breaks.
In-network providers or an employee's familiar caregiver through My Choice.
Pet care, tutoring and concierge help for the tasks around the care itself.
Eligibility, notifications, feedback, reimbursement and real-time HR reporting.
That broader menu also changes who the product is for. The public customer roster has included healthcare organizations such as TMC Health and Children's Clinics, along with 23andMe, Vantage West Credit Union and the United Nations Foundation. Testimonials also point to law firms, nonprofits and health-and-wellness companies. These are employers for whom an unexpected absence can disrupt a patient schedule, a client deadline or a small team.
One healthcare organization told Manage HR that the benefit helped it recruit 20 nurses during a difficult hiring period. That is an anecdote, not a controlled study, but it captures the sales logic. CorporateCARE is not really asking an HR leader to buy hours of sitting. It is asking them to buy attendance, retention and a visible sign that the company understands workers have people - and occasionally animals - depending on them.
Where it sits - and what makes it different
The market around CorporateCARE is crowded from several directions. Bright Horizons and Care.com offer employer-backed care at scale. UrbanSitter brings marketplace mechanics. Wellthy and Cleo emphasize navigation and family support. Local agencies offer familiarity. Employee-assistance programs handle adjacent life problems. CorporateCARE sits in the overlap: smaller than the best-known incumbents, more operational than a referral directory and more care-specific than general concierge software.
Its differentiation rests on four linked choices: pay-as-you-go consumption, a national vetted-provider network, employee-selected care when familiarity wins, and one workflow visible to employees, providers and HR. None is impossible for a competitor to copy. Together, though, they form a coherent answer to the two objections that can kill a care benefit: “Our people may not use it” and “It will be hard to administer.”
The company says its business nearly doubled in the first half of 2025. Revenue and valuation are private, and LinkedIn places the team in the 11-to-50 range. That makes CorporateCARE a compact operator in a market where fulfillment depends on many organizations it does not employ directly. Software supplies leverage, but the company still lives or dies by whether a qualified human arrives when promised.
“We come to you - so you can go to work and be productive.”CorporateCARE's operating focus
This is the tension that makes the company interesting. The product looks most technological from the HR dashboard and most human from the kitchen table. The employer wants cost control and reporting. The employee wants a safe person to walk through the door. CorporateCARE has built its position by refusing to pretend those are separate products.
The small theft worth making
There is a lesson here for any company selling insurance against unpredictable events: do not force the customer to predict the unpredictable. Meter the actual use, show the workflow, and preserve a manual path when trust matters more than automation. CorporateCARE's model is not clever because care became an app. It is clever because the technology bends around the messiness of care.
When a school closes or a parent falls, the employee does not need a corporate promise. They need a workable next step. CorporateCARE Solutions has turned that step into its entire business.