Baby-Sitting Marketplace UrbanSitter Raises $15 Million

By Brad Stone. You can find a maid or even a mate online, but par­ents are under­stand­ably cau­tious when it comes to baby-sit­ting. There’s an added sense of com­fort that comes with know­ing the sitter’s par­ents when you tear that phone num­ber off the bul­letin board at the gym.

It’s Lynn Perkins’s job to make hir­ing a sit­ter through a web­site feel safe as well as easy. She’s the co-founder and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Urban­Sit­ter, a 20-employ­ee San Fran­cis­co start­up that’s try­ing to snag a piece of the frag­ment­ed $47 bil­lion U.S. child-care busi­ness with its online mar­ket­place. The com­pa­ny has facil­i­tat­ed more than 170,000 baby-sit­ting jobs since its 2011 found­ing, most­ly in San Fran­cis­co and New York. It plans to announce on Feb. 13 that it has raised $15 mil­lion in fund­ing led by DBL Part­ners, a ven­ture cap­i­tal firm that spun out ofJP­Mor­gan Chase (JPM), and Match Group, IAC’s (IACI) dat­ing site division.

See full arti­cle at Bloomberg­Busi­ness­week.