Child care, reinvented for working families - and paid for, in part, by their employers.
THE MARK. Vivvi's smile logo - a wink and a grin built from the letters of its name. The company was named for founder Charles Bonello's niece, Vivvi, and nods to the Latin vivi, "to live."
- photo illustration, Vivvi brand mark
When Charles Bonello ran Grand Central Tech, a startup hub in Manhattan, he kept hearing the same worry in employees' voices. New parents wanted child care support from their employers - and it simply wasn't there. In 2018, with co-founder Ben Newton, he set out to build the thing companies couldn't offer. He named it after his niece, Vivvi.
Vivvi is a child care and early learning company, but that description undersells the wiring underneath it. At its most visible, it runs early learning campuses - warm classrooms for children from six weeks to five years old, open from 7am to 7pm, year-round, with rolling admissions and a research-based curriculum. Beneath that sits a business model aimed squarely at a gap most families feel and few employers address: the cost.
The company's answer is to make employers part of the equation. Through employer partnerships, companies subsidize the cost of care for their workforce, turning child care from a line item parents dread into a recruiting and retention tool. It is the same insight that built Bright Horizons a generation ago, rebuilt for urban families who want flexibility, not a one-size campus.
Vivvi's programs borrow from established teaching philosophies - elements of Montessori and Reggio Emilia - and wrap them in open floor plans, outdoor play spaces and play-based learning. The pitch to parents is quality and reliability. The pitch to employers is a productive, retained workforce. Both pitches point at the same person: the working parent trying to get to a meeting on time.
The idea has drawn capital. In February 2022, Vivvi closed a $15 million Series B led by Tribeca Venture Partners, bringing total funding to roughly $17.2 million. The money went toward new campuses, new hires, and a multi-channel platform that pushed Vivvi well past the walls of any single school.
Numbers are drawn from public sources including Business Wire, Crain's New York Business and company materials. Funding total across rounds is approximately $17.2 million.
Vivvi serves two customers at once. Parents get dependable, high-quality care; employers get a benefit that helps them hire and keep people. The problems it tackles are the ones that quietly push parents - often mothers - out of the workforce: cost, rigidity, and unreliability.
Families with infants, toddlers and preschoolers, primarily across the New York City metro, who need full-day, year-round care that fits real schedules.
Companies that offer Vivvi as a child care benefit, subsidizing cost to recruit, retain and keep their workforce productive.
Quality care in major cities can rival college tuition. Vivvi's employer-partnership model is built to close that gap for families.
One company, several ways to deliver care.
Full-day, year-round classrooms for ages six weeks to five, with experienced teachers, open floor plans, outdoor play and a research-based curriculum blending Montessori and Reggio.
Partnerships that let companies heavily subsidize care, transforming it into a tool for recruiting, retention and productivity.
On-demand coverage for employees when regular arrangements fall through - the hard days that otherwise cost a workday.
Brings Vivvi's proprietary curriculum and caregivers into families' homes in select cities.
An online platform that extends support to school-aged children beyond the early years.
Lets employers flexibly reimburse the cost of care from an employee's "trusted village" of family, friends or neighbors.
Vivvi runs a B2B2C model. It sells care and benefits to employers, who subsidize the cost for their people, while also enrolling families directly at its campuses. Revenue comes from tuition and from employer contracts for benefits like backup care, Care Cash, in-home care and virtual tutoring.
Bar widths are illustrative of channel breadth, not audited revenue figures.
Plenty of startups have chased child care with software - marketplaces, booking apps, referral tools. Winnie, Wonderschool, WeeCare, Kinside and Helpr all promise higher-tech takes on the old model. Vivvi took the harder road: it runs the actual classrooms. That is expensive and slow, but it means the quality is Vivvi's to control, not a vendor's.
At the other end sit the incumbents. Bright Horizons pioneered employer-sponsored care and has scale; KinderCare and Learning Care Group bring footprint and turnkey programs. Vivvi's wedge against them is flexibility for urban employers - faster deployment, neighborhood campuses, and offerings like Care Cash that meet families who don't want a center at all.
The combination is the point. A family can enroll at a campus, use backup care on a bad day, bring a caregiver home through in-home care, or have a grandmother's help reimbursed through Care Cash - all under one partner, often paid down by one employer. Few competitors span that full range.
It is not a winner-take-all market. Child care is stubbornly local, licensed classroom by licensed classroom. Vivvi's bet is that families and employers will pay for a single, flexible partner rather than stitching the pieces together themselves.
Charles Bonello and Ben Newton launch Vivvi in New York to make exceptional child care accessible through employer partnerships.
Vivvi opens its first Manhattan campus with full-day, year-round care and a research-based curriculum.
Led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with Rethink Education and others, to fund national growth and a new platform.
Vivvi opens its first location outside Manhattan and rolls out Care Cash, in-home care, virtual tutoring and backup care.
A new Upper East Side campus continues Vivvi's steady, classroom-by-classroom growth across the city.
Vivvi opens at The Windermere on the Upper West Side, serving up to 72 infants and toddlers.
Co-Founder & CEO. Former managing director of Grand Central Tech, where he first saw the child care gap up close.
Co-Founder, part of the team that built Vivvi's early learning and employer-partnership model from the ground up.
Series B investors
Vivvi provides child care and early learning for children from six weeks to five years old, and partners with employers to offer flexible care benefits like backup care, in-home care, virtual tutoring and Care Cash.
Vivvi was founded in 2018 by Charles Bonello (CEO) and Ben Newton, and is headquartered in New York City.
Employers subsidize the cost of care for their employees, turning child care into a recruiting and retention benefit while lowering what families pay.
Vivvi operates a growing network of early learning campuses across the New York City area, including Manhattan, Dumbo and Westchester.
Vivvi has raised roughly $17.2M total, including a $15M Series B in February 2022 led by Tribeca Venture Partners.