BridgeCare, the leading data and technology infrastructure platform for early care and education (ECE), announced today a $10 million investment from Avenue Growth Partners, an early growth equity investor in category-leading vertical SaaS companies.
The funding will enable BridgeCare to invest in innovation and services to advance its mission of supporting state and local governments in making the ECE system more equitable and effective for all.
BridgeCare, founded in 2016, is a modern SaaS solution that helps ECE leaders manage and optimize their programs, providers, and families. BridgeCare has customers in 14 states and serves more than 500,000 families and 50,000 providers with better access to affordable, high-quality child care and early childhood education.
BridgeCare’s co-founder and CEO Jamee Herbert says this investment comes on the heels of years of organic growth driven by the extraordinary need for new solutions and digital transformation in early care.
“We’ve gotten to this point by viewing our customers as our most important stakeholders and using our parent-led team to build solutions that truly deliver impact where legacy systems have fallen short,” Herbert says. “This new partnership with Avenue enables us to build on that momentum and bring our platform to even more states and counties to power equitable and accessible early care and education.”
Avenue co-founder and partner Ryan Russell says his firm was impressed by BridgeCare’s founding team and the critical need BridgeCare met in the early child care space.
“We were initially drawn to Jamee and JC as entrepreneurs, and they have done an excellent job building a high-growth business with market-leading technology,” Russell said. “Over time, we became compelled by the intersection of the company’s mission with the entrepreneurial opportunity to build a business that generates meaningful value for the early care and education ecosystem.”
BridgeCare has already gained significant national attention and achieved remarkable results in ECE, such as:
- The successful matching of more than 40,000 Colorado 4-year-olds with high-quality early childhood education with its voter-approved, mixed-delivery Universal Pre-K program, more than doubling the amount provided under the state’s former system.
- Texas’ user-friendly child care search portal called Texas Child Care Connection for families to find available child care openings statewide.
- The revamping and administration of Alabama’s First Class Pre-K Quality Rating and Improvement System (QRIS) with two tracks: Assessment and Enhancement.
- Regional adoption of Coordinated Enrollment in Virginia, currently including three of nine Ready Regions.
“We’re very proud of the impact BridgeCare has made in the space so far but there’s so much work to be done,” Herbert says. “We’re excited to build upon our existing relationships within the nation’s most ambitious ECE initiatives and deliver more innovations to make their equity and accessibility goals a reality.”
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