CareGuide

CareGuide matches families with care providers through a portfolio of services, including Sitter.com, Housekeeper.com, PetSitter.com, ElderCare.com, HouseSitter.com, CanadianNanny.ca, and NannyLane.com.

Idea

Built around a collection of irreplaceable generic domain names, the care marketplaces use a shared technology, operations, and marketing platform. We help thousands of families find child care, elder care, pet care, and household services in the US and Canada.

Leadership

I founded CareGuide in 2012 and led as CEO until 2022. The company is now led by Ali Dinani, and I moved to the Board of Directors.

Execution

Approximately 4,000,000 families & caregivers use our sites every month across the US & Canada.

CareGuide also operates the most popular household payroll service in Canada: HeartPayroll.com.

Funding

CareGuide raised $10M in seed & Series A financing from the most robust investor group in Canadian history. More than 60 angel investors, VC funds, and bank lenders are supporting the company. Our investors have themselves collectively raised $100s of millions of venture capital and sold over 25 companies, to acquisitors including Adobe, AT&T, eBay, Google, Salesforce, YP, and Zynga.

The company has mostly operated profitably over the years and used it access to expand the portfolio through the acquisition of competitive or adjacent companies and properties.

2015: Raised a $4 million seed round ($2.5 million in equity and $1.5 million in debt from RBC) to help acquire CanadianNanny. This round included participation from over 50 angel investors.
2017: Additional capital injection from Silicon Valley Bank, which preceded the acquisition of five additional companies.
2018: Closed a $6 million Series A round led by iNovia Capital and Plaza Ventures. Additional participation came from Conconi Growth Partners, Metric, Structure Capital, and FJ Labs, alongside angel investors.
2019: Secured $2 million in a Growth round led by CIBC Innovation Banking to continue expanding.

Our investor group includes 500 Startups, Aaron Dufall, Alex Black, Alkarim Nasser, Ameet Shah, Andrew D’Souza, Andrew Peek, Apostolos Apostolakis, Benjamin Yoskovitz, Bill Singleton, Brett Patrontasch, Brian Sharwood, Cameron Yuill, Chris Arsenault, Christine Aylward, Colin Jang, Corby Fine, Daniel Debow, Dave Arnsdorf, Dave Johnson, Dave McClure, Derek Szeto, Devon Galloway, Frank Barbieri, Garage Capital, George Babu, Hedgewood, iNovia Capital, Jevon McDonald, Jesse Rasch, Jillian Manus, Jim Murphy, Jim Pitkow, Jonas Brandon, Karamdeep Nijjar, LP Maurice, Mark MacLeod, Matt Mastracci, Michael Litt, Mike Greenfield, Mike McCauley, Mike Silagadze, Mike Walsh, Patrick Hankinson, Qaid Damji, Rahul Parmar, Ramesh Haridas, Rasool Rayani, Rob Laidlaw, Ryan Holmes, Satish Kanwar, Structure Capital, Ted Graham, Tim Lett, Tom Newbold, Tom Williams, and Vikas Taneja.

Future

The core fundamentals of the caregiving marketplace remain strong. The matching of local, personal services—like finding a trusted nanny or an elder care provider—is a highly localized and deeply human problem.

In the AI era, while LLMs will undoubtedly improve the operational efficiency of platforms like CareGuide (automating support, enriching profiles, improving matchmaking algorithms), they do not displace the core business model. The necessity of connecting human caregivers with human needs will continue to be a durable and growing market. CareGuide is continuing to use its recent funding to enhance its platform and expand into more North American cities like Chicago and Miami.