The Lightning Pitch: Helpr, the startup making sure sitters never flake on you again

Company: Helpr

Headquarters: Los Angeles, California

Founding team: Co-Founders Kasey Edwards (CEO) and Becka Klauber Richter (President).

Why we like it: Being a parent is hard. Getting freedom from your kids is even harder. Helpr is the get out of jail — or rather, escape your children — card that everyone has been looking for.

Helpr identifies as a real life babysitters’ club, providing parents and carers with reliable, pre-checked babysitters (i.e., ones safe to work with kids).

Serving the on-demand economy, as it were, the Helpr app offers hundreds of screened and trusted babysitters who are available with as little as three hours notice.

According to the team, unlike other babysitting services, Helpr’s babysitters have in-person interviews with Helpr staff and are background checked, double referenced checked, and CPR certified.

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The app currently services Los Angeles, Orange County, and Santa Barbara, with plans to expand to additional areas in the near future.

Co-founding team Edwards and Richter are both UCSB grads and are also founding members of FFLA (Female Founders Los Angeles), a group of women supporting women in tech leadership.

They are also part of The Vinetta Collective, the world’s first talent agency dedicated to the rise of tech’s top female founders

According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, day care and childcare as an industry will see some of the biggest growth in the run up to 2020, putting Helpr on track to have serious disruptive potential.

So, potential bugs? Well, mainly, that people like to stick with who they know. Uber is great, but has it replaced ‘the guy’ we have in our contacts book? Probably not. Similarly, we like to stick with the same doctors and teachers etc etc, so babysitters could be suspect to our own innate clinginess.

But then, lets not forget — they help you escape your kids. Oh, the humanity.