Winnie's app icon - 200K providers, zero guesswork.
The search engine America's parents didn't have - until two engineers with kids built it themselves.
It is a Sunday afternoon in 2016. A new parent opens Google and types "daycare near me." They get a map pin from 2009, a Yelp page with two reviews, and a phone number that goes to voicemail. The daycare may or may not still exist. The price is anyone's guess. Whether it has a current license - no idea.
That is not a niche problem. That is the entire U.S. childcare system as it existed before Winnie.
Today, Winnie is the platform 12 million parents use to find licensed daycare, preschool, and early education. The database covers more than 200,000 licensed providers across 7,000+ American cities, with tuition data, licensing status, inspection reports, parent reviews, and real-time availability - all in one place. Before Winnie, more than half of those providers had no web presence at all.
"Over half of licensed daycares and preschools weren't online at all before Winnie."
- Sara Mauskopf, CEO & Co-FounderThe childcare market in the United States is enormous and structurally invisible. Centers operate with paper-based waitlists. Licensing data sits in government databases that nobody built a useful interface for. Prices are quoted over the phone, if you can reach anyone. Word-of-mouth, which correlates tightly with your zip code and social network, is how most families find care.
This is not a quirk. It is a symptom. The childcare industry runs on thin margins and limited staff. Building a web presence is a luxury most small centers cannot afford, so they opt out entirely. The result: an industry serving millions of children every day, operating in near-total information darkness for the families paying for it.
That gap - between what parents need to know and what they can actually find - is exactly where Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall planted their flag.
"The childcare industry was operating the way every industry did before the internet - except the internet had arrived everywhere else."
- On Winnie's founding thesisSara Mauskopf (CEO) and Anne Halsall (CPO) met at Postmates, where they were building systems to route physical goods through cities at scale. When they each became mothers searching for childcare in San Francisco, they found themselves applying the same analytical instincts to a problem that had no good tooling.
They launched Winnie in 2016 - not as a hobby project, but as a serious infrastructure play. The premise was straightforward: if you could aggregate every licensed childcare provider's data, add structured reviews, layer in cost and availability information, and make it searchable, you could build something that millions of parents needed and no one had bothered to make.
The team they built reflects the problem they were solving. By 2021, Winnie's staff was 60% women and 48% people of color. The company offers part-time roles with equity - a structure so unusual in startup culture that it became a talking point in its own right. This is a company built by parents, for parents, run in a way that doesn't require you to pretend parenting doesn't exist during business hours.
When they closed their $9 million Series A in October 2019, both founders were pregnant with their third child. The symmetry is almost too perfect to be real. It was real.
Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall launch Winnie in San Francisco. Seed round: $2.5M. First app hits the App Store.
Launches comprehensive daycare and preschool search engine - the first of its kind in the U.S.
Nationwide expansion begins. Coverage grows from 500 cities to 7,000+ in a single year. 4M+ parents reached.
$9M Series A led by Rethink Impact. 150,000+ providers in database. Partnerships expand in California, Texas, New York, Illinois.
COVID-19 pivot: Winnie provides emergency childcare search for essential workers. School-age care added.
Named Inc. "Best Workplaces" both years. 12M users. Job marketplace for childcare workers launched via Winnie Pro.
Inc. 5000 #177 nationally. #1 Consumer Services. Au pair and summer care search added. 200,000 providers in database.
Record year: 659,000+ parent-provider matches across 153,000 providers.
Winnie started as a search tool and grew into something more complicated and more useful. The platform now operates on two sides: one for parents finding care, one for providers running their businesses.
Search 200K+ providers by location, price range, availability, care type, and special needs support. Read reviews, check inspection reports, message providers directly. Available on iOS and Android.
SaaS platform for childcare providers. Manage listings, advertise openings, get discovered by local families. Subscription model that funds Winnie's parent-side as a free service.
Connects childcare workers with open roles at centers. Built in 2022 to address the staffing crisis - childcare employment was still 12.4% below pre-pandemic levels when it launched.
Real-time childcare cost data by location. Helps families budget accurately before committing to a search - because sticker shock at the tour is a terrible experience design.
"Winnie Pro lets providers run more profitably, so they have funds to pay their teachers better."
- Sara Mauskopf, on the two-sided modelIn 2023, Winnie ranked #177 on the Inc. 5000 - the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. - and landed #1 in the Consumer Services category. California-wide, it ranked 34th across all industries. These numbers matter not because rankings are inherently meaningful, but because they're a proxy for consistent revenue growth in a market that most investors undervalued for years.
Apple featured the company on its newsroom in 2021 as a Mother's Day spotlight - a rare editorial endorsement that reflected genuine traction, not a sponsored placement. The Inc. "Best Workplaces" award in both 2021 and 2022 suggests the internal culture actually reflects what the founders said they were building.
In 2024, Winnie facilitated matches for 659,000 parents across 153,000 providers - a record year for a platform that had 4 million users just five years earlier. That trajectory is compounding, not linear.
Total raised: $15.5M. The lead investor in the Series A, Rethink Impact, specifically backs female-founded companies using technology to address large-scale societal challenges. The childcare access gap qualified easily.
Winnie's stated mission is to make it easier for every parent to find quality childcare. The practical version is more specific: build the data layer that the childcare industry never had, then make it freely accessible to families while charging the providers who benefit from being discoverable.
The team knows the structural problem well. Childcare workers earn roughly $13 per hour on average. Centers operate on thin margins with limited public funding. A significant portion of the country's licensed providers are single-location small businesses. Fixing the discovery problem doesn't fix the affordability problem - but it is a necessary precondition for fixing anything else.
The job marketplace launched in 2022 is the clearest signal that Winnie intends to operate at the system level, not just the consumer layer. Connecting workers to better-paying roles at well-run centers creates a feedback loop: better-staffed centers can serve more families, show up in more searches, and grow sustainably.
"1 in 4 families is now using a parent who works from home as their child's primary caregiver. The definition of childcare has already shifted."
- Sara Mauskopf, on post-pandemic demand patternsNew Mexico became the first U.S. state to guarantee free universal childcare for all residents regardless of income - effective late 2025. When policy shifts like that take hold, the first thing millions of families do is search for providers. They will need a reliable, current, comprehensive database to search. Winnie is positioned to be that database.
The platform's expansion into au pairs, summer camps, and special needs care signals a deliberate move toward becoming the complete childcare discovery layer - not just the daycare finder. The cost calculator, the job board, and Winnie Pro all add data that makes the platform more accurate and more useful over time. This is a business with compounding data advantages, which is the best kind of moat to build in a marketplace.
The founding insight - that the childcare industry was operating in information darkness while the rest of the consumer economy had been indexed - was correct in 2016. It is still correct. The gap between what parents need to know and what they can easily find remains significant. Winnie has spent nine years closing it.
A parent opens their phone and types "daycare near me." What comes up now is not a stale map pin from 2009. It is a current list of licensed providers with photos, tuition ranges, inspection histories, parent reviews, open spots, and a message button. It took nine years and two engineers-turned-founders to build that experience - but it works.
Winnie did not solve the American childcare crisis. The affordability problem, the staffing shortage, the patchwork of state regulations - those are still very much intact. What Winnie solved is the information problem that sat on top of all of it. Parents can now find care that exists. Providers can now be found by families who need them. Workers can find jobs at centers that will actually pay them.
That is not everything. It is not nothing, either.