Rachel Carrell, Koru Kids: “We've delivered over 1.3 million hours of childcare, helping thousands of families."

EIS eligible, female-founded business aiming to be the Uber of childcare.

Childcare is a broken market. Too often childcare services do not meet the personal and practical needs of families. The quality of care can be patchy, it can be cripplingly expensive, and the entire process is often exhausting and inefficient for parents, freelancers and shift workers. The median spend on childcare for full-time UK working couples as proportion of women’s median full time earnings is 51%, demonstrating the significance of income spent on childcare in the UK.

After having her first child whilst standing as CEO of a multinational healthcare company, founder Rachel Carrell knew change was needed to make childcare more manageable for working parents. Taking it in her stride, she founded Koru Kids, a software platform that can manage all childcare needs in a highly scalable yet personalised way. Have a read to learn more about the business’s successes to date and Rachel’s happy track - a classic!

Rachel Carrell, Founder and CEO at Koru Kids

1. Describe your startup in two sentences

Koru Kids is the UK’s biggest childcare brand, building an entirely new childcare system from scratch, using modern technology. Koru Kids is driven by a triple mission: to help families - especially working mothers - juggle the hardest years of their life; to help childcarers thrive in a difficult role; and to give children a childhood full of everyday adventures, setting them up for life.

2. What gave you the inspiration?

I was the CEO of a healthcare company when I had my first child, and all my friends also started having kids at the same time as me. I saw them struggling with childcare, as I was, and thought, 'There must be a better way.'  Not only do families in the UK now spend more on childcare than they do on their mortgage, the childcare that exists is often too inflexible to accommodate working parents’ schedules. Once I started to feel how difficult it was first hand, I knew I’d hit upon my life’s work.

3. What has been your greatest success to date? And your greatest challenge?

Our greatest success is the scale and impact we’ve already achieved: over 1.3 million hours of childcare delivered, helping thousands of families. I’m also really proud of the outstanding product experience and the technology we’ve built.

The greatest challenge is all about the problems we’re solving – which are really difficult. Building a ‘full stack’ business is hard as you have to build many different businesses at once. We recruit, train, match, manage and support childcarers – that’s five very different activities. We’ve needed to become excellent at managing complex operations, people, and technology. We’ve also had to overcome some assumptions in the funding side. Many investors and others view childcare as ‘small beans’ – not recognising the actual size and criticality of the market.

4. How has Covid affected your business?

Profoundly. In March 2020 we lost half our childcarers overnight as they went home to France, Italy, etc. Prior to covid we had been growing 3x, and we did actually still grow in 2020 – an amazing tribute to the team, as the childcare industry as a whole was devastated that year – but it was clear it wasn’t going to be a growth year. So our team took the decision to focus for the rest of the year on our product. This turned out to be a great decision as we emerged in 2021 with incredible user feedback and extremely strong unit economics, ready to grow again – which is now happening. We also took the time to launch a second service, Home Nursery, which we’re very excited about and which represents the more ‘mass market’ version of our premium nanny service.

5. What kind of impact is your business having and how do you measure it?

We think about impact on 3 dimensions: firstly we want firstly to ease access to childcare so that parents, especially mums, are able to return to work, secondly to create rewarding jobs and careers for childcare professionals at scale, and thirdly to provide high quality childcare to the children we look after so that they can flourish their whole lives long. We measure a few different things on each of these dimensions, including metrics of scale and quality, childcarer satisfaction, engagement in training and utilisation, and Net Promoter Score.

“Many investors and others view childcare as ‘small beans’ – not recognising the actual size and criticality of the market.”

6. When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up?

A foreign correspondent, reporting from war zones

7. Who is your role model/ greatest influence?

I’m hugely inspired by the Prime Minister of my homeland, Jacinda Ardern, who has rewritten the book on what a leader needs to look and sound like to be effective. Much of her power arises from her deep personal principles, which are so clearly authentic, her actions never workshopped or focus-grouped. The trust this wins her allows her to move at warp speed in a crisis, often doing things that people in other countries think impossible. In the context of covid, as well as dramatic policies that also meant inspiring a nation to become more empathetic, self-sacrificing and kind. In a world where so many leaders try to win by dividing, she wins by uniting – and we need so much more of that.

8. What is your happy track?

An old electronica song ‘Hello’ by Martin Solveig & Dragonette. It was on an episode of Ted Lasso and I’ve played it on a loop since then. I can’t get it out of my head (probably because I play it every day).

9. What are your company values?

Our company values are: Families First, Understand Don’t Overthink, Use Time Wisely, Be Humble Be Human and Open Up.

10. What are you most looking forward to in 2021?

Koru Kids is going to have an incredible year next year. We’ll fully establish our new Home Nursery service, which I’m very excited about, as well as further scale up our premium nanny service. I’m really looking forward to building on the strong foundations we’ve got and changing the face of UK childcare – it sorely needs it.