Mitra Raman was making dinner one night, watching her young son play with the babysitter, when she realized she wanted to trade places. “I’m his parent,” she recalls thinking. “I want to play with him. I want to spend time with him.”
That moment was one of the sparks for Rosie, a Seattle startup that sends caregivers into homes to do a mix of childcare and household work, from folding laundry and resetting the kitchen to watching the kids. The name is an homage to the robot housekeeper on the classic TV cartoon show “The Jetsons.”
Raman, Rosie’s CEO and a former Amazon engineer, co-founded the company last year with Chief Operating Officer Karthika Shankar, who spent more than 12 years at Amazon, managing recruiting teams and leading hiring and onboarding programs.
Rosie serves nearly 300 families in the Seattle area with a full-time team of four plus a few part-time staff and more than 100 caregivers it calls Pros.
The news: The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $7 million across two rounds led by Bling Capital and Reach Capital. Rosie says it reached seven-figure annual recurring revenue within eight months. It plans to use the funding to fuel its growth and expansion, starting with a launch in Austin in early 2027, followed by San Francisco later in the year.
Other investors include Graham & Walker (Leslie Feinzaig), Marketplace Capital, Ingeborg Investments, Precursor Ventures, Mother Ventures and Yonder Ventures. Angel investors include DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore and Seattle startup leader Aviel Ginzburg of Founders’ Co-op and Foundations.
How it works: Families buy a monthly membership: $250 for eight hours, $500 for 16 hours or $750 for 24 hours, with extra hours billed at $32 each and no long-term contract. Most families set up a weekly schedule with the same Pro, according to Rosie’s website, and they can also book same-day help through the app or by text.
Families can add Pros they like to a “bench” of regulars and book them directly. Rosie matches families with Pros and handles scheduling and payments. It runs separate apps for families and Pros, both released earlier this year.
Rosie uses AI to help with the logistics, keeping track of each family’s routines, preferences and favorite Pros, and handling matching and scheduling behind the scenes. The underlying AI system is called Jetson, continuing the theme.
But the founders say they’re deliberate about where they use AI. Raman said the company applies it where it clearly saves time or where it can be about 99% sure it’s right, because parents and Pros don’t have time to wade through AI output they don’t need.
Learning the job: In the company’s early days, Raman and Shankar worked as Rosie’s first Pros, watching kids, folding laundry, wrapping gifts and organizing garages in customers’ homes.
They also did the intake visits themselves, sitting at kitchen tables and walking through homes, where parents often apologized for the mess. Shankar recalled reassuring them: “You don’t need to show me some Pinterest-perfect house.”
The founders said the work showed them that every household runs differently, down to how a family wants its laundry folded or its dishes washed. That shaped how Rosie uses AI: to remember each home’s routines and pass them along to the Pros who work there.
GeekWire first took note of Rosie in July 2025, when it was still in a private beta.
What Pros do, and how they’re vetted: Pros will tidy up, but Rosie draws the line at deep cleaning. (Its FAQ says no scrubbing toilets.) Shankar said the company looked at what a house cleaner typically does and built its service around everything else: unloading the dishwasher, putting things away, taking out the trash, sorting outgrown kids’ clothes.
Driving children is handled case by case, with checks of a Pro’s driving record and insurance.
Vetting Pros draws in part on Shankar’s background at Amazon, where much of her recruiting work was high-volume hiring for Amazon’s field operations rather than corporate or tech jobs.
Pros go through an online intake, identity verification, a background check and reference checks run by AI. Then comes an in-person assessment at Rosie’s office on Capitol Hill, where prospective Pros fold laundry, load a dishwasher and work through childcare scenarios, using a stash of laundry that includes Raman’s kids’ old onesies. The company is now testing virtual assessments as it scales.
A long line of attempts: The best-known name in the category is Care.com, which bills itself as the largest online marketplace for family care. Families search profiles of babysitters, nannies, housekeepers and other caregivers and make their own hires.
Startups that tried a more hands-on approach have had mixed results.
Homejoy, an on-demand cleaning startup that raised about $40 million, shut down in 2015, with its CEO citing lawsuits over whether its cleaners should have been classified as employees.
Hello Alfred, which sent weekly “home managers” to handle errands and chores, raised a $40 million Series B in 2018 and launched in Seattle the next year, selling its service through apartment buildings. Its home managers were full-time employees.
The founders say Rosie is built differently. Families pay a monthly membership up front, and the model depends on the same Pros returning to the same homes each week, not one-off jobs filled by whoever is available. “Rosie does not exist without our Pros,” Shankar said.
The workforce model: Rosie classifies its Pros as independent contractors, paid per session through the company’s app. Rosie sets what families pay and what Pros earn, matches Pros with families and clarifies the tasks for each session before it’s booked.
Asked why Rosie’s Pros aren’t classified as employees, Raman said they have “full flexibility to decide what they do, what session they take, when they take it.”
“We’re not going to tell you where and what to work,” she said. “You decide.”
Rosie’s Pros include college students and part-time professionals looking for flexible work. Pay is set by an algorithm that weighs factors including the length of a session, the number of children, the type of work and whether the Pro is returning to a family they’ve worked with before.
Shankar said part-time Pros might earn a couple hundred dollars a week, while those who work more can make $500 to $1,000 a week. Recent Rosie job listings in the Seattle area have advertised $22 to $24 an hour, plus bonuses.
From Seattle to Austin and S.F.: When the service launched in January, Rosie opened to anyone in the Seattle area to see where demand and supply would come from. Pros mostly want steady routines close to home, and many in Seattle rely on public transit, Raman said.
“Who shows up actually matters,” Raman said. “It’s not interchangeable supply. Families want to see the same Pro again and again.”
In Seattle, that open approach meant some families and Pros lived far apart. In new cities, the company plans to launch neighborhood by neighborhood, starting where it expects to find its first Pros.
Austin and San Francisco share Seattle’s mix of tech-friendly, dual-income families, plus nearby universities where Rosie can recruit Pros.
Raman said the company chose to launch next in Austin partly because it’s different from Seattle in other ways. One difference: People there drive more and rely less on public transit, which changes how Pros get to families.
Rosie is hiring an in-person city general manager in Austin, according to its job listings, along with a senior software engineer and a “forward deployed engineer” for operations. That posting describes a goal of “100% AI-managed matching and scheduling with a small, deliberate human-in-the-loop.”
The bigger idea: The founders see childcare as the entry point to a broader platform. Some families are already booking Pros through Rosie for pet care and companionship for older relatives, Shankar said, and others are asking for help with errands and driving.
Raman described the overall thesis: “If you trust us with your kids,” she said, “you’ll trust us then with everything else.”
