Waltham, MA-based Care.com announced this morning that it nabbed $50 million in a Series E financing led by new investor Institutional Venture Partners. Return backers including Matrix Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Trinity Ventures also joined the round.
This financing follows a $25 million round of funding announced in October 2011, and brings the total raised by the six-year-old company to $110 million. Care.com was founded in 2006 by Sheila Lirio Marcelo as a platform enabling families to search and rate care providers and services such as babysitters, tutors, camps, pet sitters, and senior homes.
The website now boasts 7 million members across 15 countries, and recently acquired the Berlin-based online care platform Besser Betreut. Care.com also launched sites in the U.K. and Canada. Part of the funding will be used for new acquisitions for Care.com, said Marcelo, the company’s CEO, in a phone call today.
“We’re looking to acquire either to expand our coverage geographically, to go and expand our verticals, or to go deeper in our existing verticals,” she says.
She declined to explain exactly which service areas the site, which targets moms as its main audience, is eyeing. “But with a domain like Care.com, I’ll let you fill in the rest,” she said.
Care.com earns revenue with subscription and referral fees, services it provides through employers like Google and Facebook, and care planning services. The company has 160 employees in its main offices, another 100 in Berlin, and about 10 in other locations, and is planning on putting much of the new funding toward hiring across different departments, Marcelo says.
