Wonderschool - a16z & Goldman

Founded in 2016, we are a marketplace and management software that helps solve the child care crisis. We connect governments, child care providers, parents, teachers, and nonprofits on an integrated platform. Our main goal is to expand access to child care and preschool options, especially by helping home-based child care businesses get started and grow.

For providers, we offer comprehensive support to launch and operate high-quality programs. This includes assistance with licensing, classroom setup, pricing strategy, website creation, enrollment support, daily operations, business coaching, teacher recruitment, substitute teaching pool, and a Child Care Finder page. Our platform supports various program types like Friends, Family, and Neighbor Care (FFN), Home Based, Family Child Care, Child Care Centers, Head Start, YMCA, and Franchise models.

For governments, we provide tools to manage and expand early education ecosystems. These help states and municipalities identify child care deserts, support local providers, improve program quality, and ensure families can access suitable programs. Our offerings for government partners include solutions for New Program Creation, Teacher Recruitment, Substitute Teaching Pool management, Business Coaching for providers, and Child Care Finder tools.

We’ve seen significant impacts, such as creating 4,300 child care slots in Michigan, facilitating 50,000 hours worked by substitute teachers in Mississippi, and serving 16,000 schools and child care providers in Florida. We’re backed by investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, and First Round Capital, having raised over $50M. We specialize in Government Software, Child Care Provider Software, a Child Care Marketplace, and a Substitute Teacher Marketplace, operating within the Education Management industry.

Our mission is to create an ecosystem that empowers early educators to build sustainable businesses and enables families to easily find high-quality childcare. Our vision is to ensure that every child has access to quality early care and education within five minutes of home, no matter where they live.

Our core values guide our operations and culture. These include being open and transparent, working backwards from aggressive goals, ensuring every voice matters, and focusing on helping providers make more money. We also emphasize being a driver, delighting customers, being scrappy, fostering cross-functional collaboration (“No ‘I’ In Wonderschool”), doing the right thing, and acting with urgency to achieve our objectives.

We operate as a fully remote company, with a hybrid work environment for our team of 51-200 employees. Our culture is mission-driven, attracting passionate individuals focused on building technology solutions for the child care sector. We prioritize health and wellness so employees can do their best work while achieving personal and professional goals.

We foster an inclusive workplace that values diversity across race, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, perspectives, and ideas. Approximately 40% of our employees identify as a person of color, and over 50% identify as female. Cross-functional collaboration is a critical part of who we are and necessary for our success.

We offer competitive compensation, benefits, and opportunities for growth.

Our employee benefits include flexible Paid Time Off (PTO), which covers 10 paid holidays, a one-week company winter break between Christmas and New Year’s, and quarterly mental health refresh days.

For wellness, we provide a monthly gym membership stipend. As a remote-first company, new employees receive a stipend to set up their home office and a monthly wifi stipend. Our health benefits include up to 100% coverage for employee premiums and up to 80% for dependents. We offer parental leave to employees after six months of employment.