Felicia Curcuru launched Binti as a consumer tech company to help families adopt children. After four months shadowing social workers in San Francisco, she realized government controlled most of the process. “So to really help, I’d have to partner with government to solve the problem from the inside,” Curcuru told ImpactAlpha.
Binti provides software to more than 550 child welfare agencies, including in Utah, Rhode Island and Los Angeles County, to help caseworkers spend less time doing paperwork and more helping families keep their children out of foster care. Binti also helps children in foster care find their extended family.
“We’re really trying to make the case that government tech, the critical public services that government provides to people in vulnerable communities, it’s a category for impact investing,” said Dan Geballe of Durham-based SJF Ventures, which invested in Binti out of its $175 million fifth fund.
Binti, he said, “is working with government agencies to figure out how these children can hopefully stay in their homes. And if not, how they can be directed to families and other services that help have better outcomes for them.”
Mission-aligned investors
Binti’s family-finding module helps caseworkers discover extended family members and quickly get licensed to prevent children from entering foster care. Its service-referral module connects vulnerable families with community resources before a child is placed in the system.
“We’ve expanded our product to a full suite of child welfare solutions, including products that help agencies keep families together and help find relatives of children to take them in,” Curcuru said. She plans to use the $6 million investment from SJF to build AI-powered modules.
The investment brings Binti’s total raised to $66 million. Other investors include Kapor Capital, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures. The San Francisco-based company is looking to raise a Series C funding round this year.
