Help That Knows Your Home: Why We Invested in Rosie

As a dad of three young kids, I’m all too familiar with a problem faced by busy parents today: finding help that is both easy to book and already familiar with the specific needs of my family. In any given week, that means backup childcare for sick days and daycare closures; babysitting when one or both of us has a work event; a mother’s helper for the laundry, dishes, and meal prep that won’t trigger their various allergies.

The informal safety net that used to cover these moments has frayed. A 2022 Pew survey found that 44% of American adults have only “a few” or no extended family members within an hour’s drive, a share that rises with education and income. Friendship networks have also thinned, with Americans today reporting far fewer close friends than a generation ago.

Even parents who can afford to pay for help have few good options. Nanny agencies require expensive minimum-hour commitments, while self-serve marketplaces like Care.com leave most of the vetting and managing to parents. And every new helper starts from zero knowledge — which kid is allergic to what, how bedtime routine works, how the parents like chores done. They have to learn these things over many visits, and the family has to teach them all over again whenever they move on.

Rosie is building the operating system for the household. Families buy a monthly membership of hours, and Rosie matches them with vetted Pros who handle both childcare and housework, from date-night babysitting and backup care to meal prep, to daily house resets. What makes this all work smoothly is the AI Family Brain, which learns each family’s routines and preferences through conversational onboarding, texts, and feedback after each session, then turns them into a Guidebook that each Pro reviews before walking through the door. My own “wow” moment came when I onboarded my family as part of due diligence; after a quick three-step chat, Rosie produced a Guidebook for my household with much more detail, intuition and empathy than I expected from software.

The core insight behind Rosie is that household help has always forced a tradeoff between reliability and personalization. A nanny knows your family intimately but cannot cover every hour or every task. A marketplace can usually find someone, but that someone is a stranger to your kids and home. Rosie gives each family a go-to weekly pro, plus a bench of 3-5 others. Because household context lives in Rosie rather than in someone’s head, a bench pro can cover a shift without starting from scratch. We believe this is the only way to scale a trust-based system without becoming a pure staffing agency with service margins. At Reach Capital, we’ve long believed that supporting kids means supporting the whole family, and for working parents, reliable help at home is what makes everything else possible.

Rosie was founded by Mitra Raman (CEO) and Karthika Shankar (COO), who are childhood friends, moms of young kids, and serial entrepreneurs solving their own problems. Mitra is deeply technical. She was an engineer and engineering manager at Amazon; led engineering teams at Ro, Glossier, and Pave; and previously founded Buttermilk (YC S18). Karthika spent most of her career in recruiting and Learning and Development at Amazon, with experience that applies directly to how Rosie sources, vets, and supports its pros. During our due diligence, an existing investor ranked Mitra and Karthika as top-decile operators within their portfolio, and working with them has only confirmed it.

Since launching at the end of 2025, Rosie has completed more than 3,500 sessions with a 4.9/5 average rating and has filled 99% of same-day requests. We recently led Rosie’s $4.8M seed round alongside our friends at Bling Capital, Mother Ventures, and Marketplace Capital, and we are thrilled to partner with Mitra, Karthika, and the team. 

Rosie is live across Greater Seattle today, with Austin coming next. If you’re a Seattle parent tired of starting from zero every time you need help, give Rosie a try. And if you want to help build the future of household help, the team is hiring.