A blue hippo, a rolling hedgehog, and a kingdom of fools: Ladybird Entertainment's catalog reveals how an Iranian animation studio thinks about children, comedy, and stories that travel.
Natacha Beim Boserup could not persuade existing schools to adopt her early-learning ideas, so she opened one herself. Twenty-eight years later, CEFA packages curriculum, teacher training and a premium school experience into a franchise that costs roughly C$2.5 million to C$3 million to open.
It sells peace of mind to working parents, a business to local owners, and a play-based curriculum to nearly 100,000 kids. Inside the franchise that turned early childhood into one of America's most resilient service industries.
The private preschool operator has grown from 225 schools in 2020 to 350 in 2026. Its playbook is scale behind the scenes, local identity out front - and a curriculum designed to make care feel like preparation, not parking.
Vivvi is a New York-based child care and early learning company that partners with employers to make high-quality care affordable and flexible for working families. Founded in 2018 by Charles Bonello and Ben Newton, it operates a growing network of early learning campuses for children from six weeks to five years old, and layers on employer-sponsored offerings such as backup care, in-home care, virtual tutoring, and its Care Cash reimbursement program. The model turns child care into a recruiting and retention benefit for companies while giving parents full-day, year-round, research-based programs.
Teaching Strategies is a Bethesda, Maryland based early childhood education company best known for The Creative Curriculum and GOLD, a formative assessment system used by hundreds of thousands of teachers serving children from birth through third grade. The company provides integrated curriculum, observation-based assessment, family engagement tools, and professional development across Head Start, public Pre-K, private child care, and elementary programs in the United States and abroad.
Winnie is a San Francisco-based childcare marketplace that connects millions of parents with licensed daycare centers, preschools, and early education providers across the United States. Founded in 2016 by Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall - two former Google and Postmates engineers who were also parents - Winnie has grown from a local San Francisco app into a national platform covering 200,000+ licensed providers in over 7,000 cities. The platform combines comprehensive data (tuition costs, licensing status, inspection reports, availability) with community reviews and a SaaS layer for providers called Winnie Pro. Ranked #177 on the 2023 Inc. 5000 list and #1 in Consumer Services, Winnie sits at the intersection of a 500-billion-dollar childcare crisis and a generation of parents who expect the same search experience for daycares that they get for restaurants.