Julia Cohen Sebastien and the Work Nobody Mentioned

Julia Cohen Sebastien had a phrase for the work that people carried into the office without putting it on their calendars: “quiet caregiving.” It described employees looking after someone they loved while keeping the responsibility largely out of workplace conversation. The work existed. The admission could feel risky. A company might know a person’s title, manager, and performance targets while missing a substantial part of what occupied their day.

For Sebastien, that gap became a subject to discuss publicly and a business to build. With her longtime friend Kassidee Kipp, she founded Grayce in 2019. They offered employers a service combining digital tools and individual guidance for employees managing family responsibilities. The proposition was practical: help people organize the work that followed them home, and sometimes followed them straight back into the next meeting.

Her company’s story eventually included a different kind of announcement. In November 2025, Grayce formally referred its clients to Cariloop as its services transitioned. The arc runs through friendship, corporate operating experience, a funding round, and a handoff. Each stage asks something of a founder beyond having a good idea.

A friendship before a company

The relationship came first. By the time Grayce announced its Series A in 2024, Sebastien and Kipp had known one another for more than two decades. They had met through a mentoring program. A startup partnership can involve learning someone’s judgment at considerable speed; these two had a longer introduction.

Both founders brought experience of supporting loved ones alongside demanding careers. They also brought different professional histories. Sebastien had worked in consulting, strategy, and operations. Kipp had worked at Google and early-stage companies. Their common ground was a problem familiar outside the office, where a professional résumé rarely tells the whole story.

The decision to start a venture grew out of conversations between them. By 2019, that conversation had become Grayce. Selling through employers created a way to reach people who were already trying to fit two sets of obligations into one day. It also gave the founders a demanding audience: businesses needed a reason to buy, and families needed a reason to trust.

The operator at the kitchen table

Sebastien’s education brought together Dartmouth and Wharton. She earned a BA at Dartmouth College and an MBA at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where her public biography identifies her as a Howard E. Mitchell Fellow. Her working life included The Advisory Board Company, Boston Consulting Group, Aetna, and Clarify Health Solutions.

At BCG, she worked as a project leader. At Aetna, her roles included corporate strategy and senior vice president of strategy and operations for Accountable Care Solutions. Clarify added commercial leadership to the record. There was also growth and strategy work at Pager. These were jobs concerned with how organizations make decisions, allocate effort, and turn a proposition into an operation.

Grayce brought those questions closer to the kitchen table. A service has to decide what happens after someone asks for help. Who listens? Who sorts the list? Who takes responsibility for the next action? In this setting, a polished explanation of the problem would have limited value if the person still had the same unfinished tasks afterward.

That is an interesting move for someone trained in strategy. The unit of work becomes small enough to matter to one household. The company still needs a viable model, but its usefulness has to survive contact with an ordinary working day.

A name for the silence

Sebastien described quiet caregiving as supporting someone without discussing it at work. She spoke about employees worried that disclosing their responsibilities would affect how they were valued. Silence, in that account, was part of the workplace problem.

The phrase had a useful precision. A person can appear fully available while privately negotiating competing demands. The employer sees the work delivered and the meetings attended. The employee knows what it took to make both happen. Without a conversation, the two accounts can remain remarkably far apart.

Sebastien’s public argument was to make that responsibility easier to acknowledge. The wording helped place family commitments inside a discussion about employment, where the available vocabulary often reduces everything to availability. A useful label lets people begin a conversation without having to supply their entire life story as the opening paragraph.

“This is about all the people who are caring for a loved one, but not talking about it.”

Julia Cohen Sebastien

Two audiences, one promise

Grayce sold to employers, while employees and families used its service. That separation creates a particular test for a founder. A buyer can approve a contract. The person receiving the benefit still has to understand it, remember it, and feel comfortable approaching someone for help.

At Grayce, the offering joined a digital platform with dedicated Care Partners. Planning, resources, practical assistance, and community were parts of the design. The presence of a person mattered to the proposition: someone could help put a sequence around a set of demands that had arrived without one.

In a 2023 public discussion, Sebastien appeared alongside Okta benefits leader Angelina Shamborska. Family support had ranked among the top three requests from Okta employees, behind retirement matching and recognition. The conversation gave Sebastien’s argument an employer setting: the need could become visible when a benefits team asked people what they wanted.

There is a useful distinction here between making a benefit available and making it usable. A contract resolves the first question. The second depends on the experience of the person who reaches for it. Sebastien’s business had to account for both, with the employer and employee judging value from different sides of the same arrangement.

A product with room to be put down

As the company developed, its founders encountered a broader set of family relationships than their original emphasis on older parents. Children, spouses, and other loved ones came into view. So did geography. An employee’s work location offered an incomplete picture of where the people they supported actually lived.

Kipp described another operating choice: Grayce was not trying to maximize daily active users. The aim was to be remembered when help was needed while supporting people with ongoing responsibilities. That is an unusual sentence in a software business, where opening the product can become a proxy for finding it useful.

The distinction suits the problem Sebastien had named. People already carrying a private list of obligations have a limited appetite for acquiring another one. If assistance works, some of its value may appear away from the screen, in a decision made or a task moved forward. A dashboard has to leave room for that possibility.

In June 2024, Grayce announced a $10.4 million Series A led by Maveron. The stated plans included improving the employer offering and member experience, alongside expansion into another customer market. It was a substantial company milestone. The everyday test remained whether the service could make a complicated situation more manageable for the person using it.

Start with the result

Sebastien’s advice to employers began upstream of the purchasing decision: decide what result you want. Keeping people at work, giving them knowledge, and returning time to their day can lead to different choices. A catalogue of benefits can look comprehensive while leaving the person browsing it unsure where to begin.

Her question puts a useful discipline on generosity. An employer needs to understand the task its support is meant to accomplish. More options can help, but options also require someone to evaluate them. Practical assistance has value when it helps a person move through that work.

In her 2024 public remarks, Sebastien argued that employees wanted help lightening their responsibilities alongside flexibility and time away. That distinction is easy to recognize in the calendar: a free afternoon creates room to do something. It still matters whether someone can help work out what to do first.

Across these conversations, her public emphasis stayed close to execution. What does the employee need? How will they find it? What happens after the introduction? These are service questions, and they also describe the distance between an employer’s intention and an employee’s experience.

The responsibility of a handoff

On November 13, 2025, Grayce and Cariloop announced an agreement formally referring all Grayce clients to Cariloop. Sebastien, identified as CEO and co-founder, emphasized continued support for clients and employees as Grayce’s services transitioned. “I wholeheartedly recommend Cariloop,” she said.

The handoff belongs in her story alongside the founding and the financing. Employees using a service have a practical interest in who will help next. For the founder, the announcement brings the focus back to the relationships formed while building the business.

Sebastien had helped give a name to responsibilities that could disappear from workplace view. She and Kipp built a company around making those responsibilities easier to manage. The later transition leaves that original question available to every employer: what work are your people doing that your organization has never learned to see?