It’s a scenario familiar to many working parents. It’s set up to be a day much like any other: a busy one. You’re preparing for an important meeting with investors, then an interview with a potential new hire and then it’s time to catch up with existing clients and onboard new ones. A perfectly ordinary day. Until the unexpected, yet entirely predictable happens. Your childcare falls through.

“I would have had to reschedule four or five meetings,” says Hannah Sutcliffe, the co-founder and COO of The Moonhub, a VR platform for workplace training. She is also the mother of eight-month-old Jesse. “I was meant to be meeting our new Head of Operations that day.” Like many founders, Hannah is extraordinarily busy. In spite of being on maternity leave, she keeps in touch with her team regularly and is also completing a part-time course at Oxford University to boost her skills.

Her partner works full time and family members weren’t available. She has never used a babysitter before but she was able to specify her requirements using Bubble’s screening and review rating system to find the perfect sitter for her needs (see her interview with Bubble here). “She’s really interactive with Jesse and has experience with six-month old twins,” Hannah says. “She’s probably going to become a regular.”

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In October 2023, as part of its offering to founders in the portfolio, Ada Ventures funded 40 hours of back-up or emergency childcare per founder in partnership with Bubble, the UK’s leading on-demand childcare platform (and an Ada portfolio company). The support lets parents book planned or last-minute in-home childcare, whenever they need it, including to cover the gaps created by childcare arrangements falling through.

It has been a success. 30% of eligible Ada Ventures founders have already used the back-up emergency childcare service in less than one year since it launched and 50% of eligible founders have either used it or intend to use it in the future. Ada Ventures co-founding Partner Check Warner was invited on Sky News to share why we’ve invested in childcare for the portfolio.

“We wanted to set an example about how a company can embrace parenthood and actively support parents in our team, portfolio and wider community,” says Check, who has used the service herself for her daughter (now eight months) and son (two and a half years). Ada Ventures champions Inclusive Alpha®, an approach that seeks to prioritise an inclusive lens at all stages in the investment process — from the investment team structure to the investment strategy, to sourcing, selection and portfolio support. All of this is done to drive investment performance alongside positive impact.

The effects of the Inclusive Alpha® strategy are evident in the data. NPS sentiment survey shows that founders generally rated the VC industry negatively for welcoming and including people from diverse backgrounds with diverse needs. In contrast, every group of founders scored Ada Ventures positively in this regard, with female founders giving the company a score of 90.

Making it easier for parents to work is key to providing an inclusive environment. Often women have to shoulder much of the child-care burden. A survey of more than 4,000 women in the UK last year found as many as 67% felt childcare duties in the past decade had cost them progress at work. The effects of the startup ecosystem are clear. Accessible, affordable childcare is regularly cited as one of the top barriers to women starting businesses. According to NPS data, founders in the Ada Ventures portfolio, particularly those from the global majority see it as a barrier to scaling their business. And it’s a difficulty which isn’t often discussed.

Hannah was initially reluctant to share the news about her pregnancy. “You don’t necessarily know what kind of reaction you’re going to get.” It also taps into deeper anxieties about conflicting priorities. “I had a real fear of being selfish,” she says.

Competing demands at work and home remain a concern.“My wife and I both work so one of us has to take care of the kids after work and during holiday time,” says Mark Whitcroft, founder and CEO of PlannerPal, an AI-assistant for financial planners. He used Bubble when his two-year-old daughter was sent home from nursery with a slight temperature. “All these hours are time away from building our business.” PlannerPal is now live with 300 financial advice firms in the UK and onboards about 20 new financial advisors a week.

He values the Bubble offering as key to maintaining a more holistic and transparent relationship between founder and investor. “It’s like a business marriage,” he says. “It could be 10 years plus partnership. In that time, there will be ups and downs, and you want to have a relationship where the information flows from the founders to the investor. The investor needs to show that they care about other things going on in that founder’s life.”

And it has changed how Hannah sees things in her own business. She has adapted her maternity policy and is looking to offer a similar childcare offering to Moonhub employees. “It’s made me more resilient. I know that if I can work around childcare and still attend meetings.” In addition to the practical benefits, she thinks it has improved her communication skills. “I feel that being a mother has made me more empathetic to people. I want to connect with people on a deeper level.”

The Bubble offering has been warmly welcomed by other founders in the Ada Ventures portfolio as an industry-setting initiative and (as intended) is being replicated across other funds. “It has been heartening to see other venture firms pick up this lead set by Ada by offering childcare support to their portfolios,” says Julia Fan Li, Co-Founder & CEO Micrographia Bio, a next-generation drug-discovery company, and another working parent said, “Once again, Ada has set in motion a welcome ripple effect to build for the future we want to see.”

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