Why We Invested in Binti
Every child deserves a safe, stable, loving family. The U.S. child welfare system is falling short.
Today, more than 400,000 children are in foster care in the United States. Many of those children experience abuse, neglect, trauma, or instability before ever entering the system. Despite the efforts of social workers, foster families, and community organizations, the outcomes are still often heartbreaking. Foster youth face dramatically higher rates of homelessness, incarceration, and mental health challenges than their peers.
Caseworkers bear the burden of helping families in crisis, but they often lack the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. Existing software solutions, which are designed to satisfy compliance requirements, often leave caseworkers spending hours each week manually filling out forms, reconciling documents, and re-entering information across disparate systems. This administrative burden is a significant contributing factor to staff turnover rates of 20–40%, among the highest of any social work specialty. Binti was founded to help caseworkers overcome that administrative burden, to ultimately better serve children and their foster and adoptive families. What began as software to modernize foster and adoptive family licensing has evolved into a comprehensive platform helping child welfare agencies recruit, approve, support, and place children more effectively. Today, Binti partners with more than 550 agencies across 36 states and has supported more than 100,000 families and thousands of social workers nationwide.
The impact is measurable. Across Binti’s network, agencies have seen approximately 30% more foster and adoptive families approved each year while reducing approval timelines and administrative burden on social workers. Agencies report social workers spending 20–40% less time on administrative work, allowing more time for the social work that makes a tangible difference for families. These impacts are accelerating with the integration of AI into Binti’s product suite. Beyond providing modern technical solutions to the child welfare industry, Binti is enabling a better model of care. For decades, child welfare systems were designed around managing cases after a child had already entered foster care. Today, policymakers and practitioners are focused on prevention, connecting families with resources and support before separation becomes necessary. Children experience better outcomes when they can safely remain with their families, and when removal is necessary, placement with relatives or community members is preferable for long-term child welfare. Binti has built its platform around the full continuum of child welfare, from prevention and family support to reunification, kinship placement, adoption, and services for youth aging out of the system. By helping agencies keep families together whenever possible and prioritize community-based solutions when separation cannot be avoided, Binti is aligning technology with the results that matter most for children and families.
We also believe extraordinary companies are built by extraordinary founders. From our first conversations with CEO Felicia Curcuru, it was clear that she possesses a rare combination of qualities: deep empathy for the families and children she serves, intellectual rigor in understanding a complex system, and relentless determination to drive change at a national scale.
Felicia’s journey began after witnessing firsthand how difficult the adoption process was for her own family. Rather than accept the status quo, she immersed herself in the child welfare ecosystem, spending months alongside agencies and social workers to understand the root causes of the problem before building a solution. Over the years, we have learned that enduring companies are often created by founders like Felicia–who cannot imagine working on anything else. We are confident Binti has the vision, the technology, and the leadership to transform the child welfare industry and are honored to be a partner in their journey.
