Reach Capital, a venture capital firm focused on educational tech startups, lead the funding round for startup Winnie, raising $4 million. Other investors in the new round include Rethink Impact, Homebrew, Ludlow Ventures, among others. With the new funds, Winnie has raised $6.5 million to date. They are planning to use the new funds to hire additional engineers to help them scale their platform.
Winnie is essentially Yelp for parents. The app helps parents find the sort of information that they wouldn't necessarily be able to find on Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) or Yelp (NYSE: YELP) directly. For instance, parents can use Winnie to find nearby kid-friendly destinations, as well as places with various accessibility features for those with young ones such as changing tables in bathrooms, wide aisles for strollers, areas for nursing etc. The data on Winnie is crowd-sourced, with details, ratings, and reviews coming from other real parents who have visited these places. The app is now available in 10,000 cities and just passed 1 million users.
Winnie was founded by Sara Mauskopf, a Bay Area technologist and a new parent, who has previously worked at startup food delivery app Postmates, as well as major companies like Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), YouTube, and Google. Recently, Winnie has also been working to expand beyond its "Yelp for parents" model and now features an online community for parents to ask questions and discuss various topics. Mauskopf noted that a "crowdsourced directory of family-friendly businesses is still a huge component of what we do...and this has grown to over 2 million places across the United States. But we also have these real-time answers to any parenting question from this authentic, supportive community." Anne Halsall, Winnie co-founder and CPO, also added that many "younger millennial parents are turning to Google to find answers to these questions. So we want to have the answer to these questions at the ready, and we want to have the best page. That's an example of something that's yield a lot of traffic for us, just because no one else had that data before Winnie."