Upwards, a Marina del Rey-based child care startup, announced a new partnership with the city of Pico Rivera earlier this month that allows child care providers like daycares and preschools to access a suite of technical tools that would automate processing tuition payments, attendance tracking and sending updates to parents.

Upwards was founded in 2017 by Jessica Chang, who started her own preschool when she had trouble finding affordable and accessible care for her kid amid long waitlists and high tuition prices. The company has raised $43.3 million to date, $21 million of which came from a series B funding round last year.

“We need to be on a mission to solve care for good,” Chang said. “Solving it has to be sustainable, and it has to be for everyone to enjoy, not just the people that can afford it.”

But building out the administrative and technical capabilities of running a child care center is only half the battle for startups like Upwards, which sit in the middle of a complex web of labor shortages and funding pitfalls that have a ripple effect on everyday workers. The economics of child care are complex – it is both difficult for parents to afford, and yet low wages and stressful working conditions (exacerbated by the labor shortage) are leading preschool workers to quit in droves. The result is a shortage of early childhood educational institutions, of which experts say are critical to childhood development and a boon to working parents who would otherwise have to miss work due to child care scheduling problems.

“We realized pretty quickly that we needed to do more and have more stakeholders involved in trying to solve care,” Chang said. “This is actually when we pivoted from a B2C (business-to-consumer) marketplace to actually a B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) marketplace. Specifically, we got both employers and the government involved in really spreading the cost of child care among not just families, but families, employers and the government.”

Partnerships with local cities, municipalities

Upwards began partnering with cities and municipalities to bolster local child care providers through its Boost program, allowing them to automate administrative tasks, access long-term career mentorship to improve retention, and ease the burnout that has been plaguing the sector. The company has partnered with around 20 municipalities nationwide in an effort to boost the overarching pool of workers in that city.

“By supporting child care providers, we’re also supporting a larger workforce and their ability to go to work because they have child care,” Chang said.

Upwards doesn’t make money from child care providers that utilize Boost. Instead, it constructs child care benefit programs for employers, who often use it as a strategy to retain employees, and makes deals with cities to pay for its services.

Other venture-backed companies have joined the fray to solve the issue of disappearing and inaccessible early child care. Brella Space Corp., a Playa Vista-based scheduling platform for the daycare sector, has raised around $16 million to date to help parents who work odd hours find affordable child care when they need it.