Our mission
We’re making excellent child care accessible to all.
We believe that providers should focus on providing incredible child care — the kind of work that only people can do — and that software should manage the rest. We’re building the child care management platform that eliminates the administrative work of running a center.
Our founding story
A product made out of love
We come from a family with a background in Early Childhood Education. Our mother is the executive director of a center with over 250 kids, and she also teaches an early childhood master's programs at UCLA and AJU. In addition, our grandmother works as a preschool administrator, our aunt runs a chain of child care centers, and our cousins are home-based child care providers.
We witnessed firsthand the overwhelming task of running a child care program — maintaining full enrollment, processing family paperwork, tracking attendance, billing families, sharing updates from the classroom, scheduling & paying staff, and much, much more.
Every day was stressful and the only tools our family had available were spreadsheets and clunky software. Our family's time was dominated by piecing together outdated software and painstakingly updating their various spreadsheets.
When our family couldn’t find another tool, they turned to us to create their own. As our family started using Playground to streamline their job, they were able to spend all their newfound time with the kids they care for. From there, Playground quickly spread to child care providers across the nation and we're now helping providers eliminate their tedious administrative work.
A note from our CEO
"While we initially built Playground for our family, we quickly realized there were so many other use cases in early child care, besides the programs our families ran, that could use software built just for them.
In response, we expanded our vision, grew our team, created new products, and started becoming the full child care management software company we are today.
A lot has changed since we started, but our love for early child care, our team, and our product remind us who we are and keep us on track moving forward."
Daniel Andrews
Playground's timeline
August 2019
Daniel, Josh, and Sasha start working on what will later become Playground
January 2020
Beta launch in Los Angeles, CA
May 2021
Raised $3.35M in Seed Funding from leading investors including Human Capital, Bedrock Capital, and Kleiner Perkins
August 2022
Opened Playground HQ in New York City
October 2022
Partnered with the State of Iowa to provide Playground to all Iowa child care providers for free
December 2022
Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 List
June 2023
Partnered with Child Care Aware of Kansas to provide Playground to all Kansas child care providers for free
August 2023
Partnered with Nebraska Early Childhood Collaborative to provide Playground to participating Nebraska child care providers for free
April 2024
Partnered with
Indiana's Office of Early Childhood and Out-of-School Learning to provide Playground to Indiana child care providers for free
May 2024
Partnered with
Southwest Human Development to provide Playground to participating Arizona child care providers for free
