Care.com

Care.com is an online marketplace for childcare, senior care, special needs care, tutoring, pet care, and housekeeping through membership in a two-sided marketplace. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has additional offices in Berlin, Germany.
The site has 32.9 million members across 20 countries, and attracts 6.4 million unique visitors a month, with a new job posted every 30 seconds.
Care.com is also offered as an employee benefit by 150 companies and organizations, such as Google and Facebook. The company raised $111 million in venture funding before going public on January 24, 2014. 
In February 2020, Care.com was acquired by IAC and is no longer publicly traded.
History.
Sheila Lirio Marcelo, who helped start the college savings site Upromise and was vice-president and general manager of TheLadders.com, came up with the idea for Care.com when she had trouble finding someone to help care for her first child. Then her father had a heart attack while he was caring for her second child, and she had difficulty finding care for him in addition to child care.
When Care.com launched in 2007, it helped customers find babysitters, tutors, pet care and senior care. The site also offers other services, such as housekeeping and care for special needs children and adults. Users can search, post jobs and look at some caregiver profiles for free as basic members or enroll as premium members and pay a monthly, quarterly, or yearly subscription fee for full access to the platform and all caregivers. The site also helps people find job opportunities in their area by posting a profile and applying to openings for a monthly fee. The company offers a babysitting rate calculator that helps parents calculate what to pay their sitter.
Between October 2006 and the end of 2012, Care.com received $111 million in funding from investors including Matrix Partners, Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn), Trinity Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, USAA, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). 
It expanded its online marketplace into the United Kingdom in April 2012, followed after by Canada. The company debuted Karoo, a private mobile social network that connects families and caregivers, which was later shut down, in September 2012.
In December 2012, Care.com launched Care.com Recruiting Solutions to help care-related businesses hire caregivers and fill staff openings through the site.
In June 2013, Care.com and Knowledge Universe, a company that runs child care centers throughout the country, announced a partnership, where Care.com corporate clients will have access to KU's facilities for backup care.
In November 2013, Care.com filed for an initial public offering with Morgan Stanley, BofA, Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan as the joint book-running managers, and Allen & Company LLC and Stifel as senior co-managers. In December 2013 details of the IPO were first revealed, with January 2014 reports saying that the company planned to raise $85.6 million by offering 5.35 million shares, at $14 to $16 each, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "CRCM". On January 23, 2014, 5.35 million shares were priced at $17. Care.com went public on January 24, 2014, with shares climbing to $22.55, up about 30 percent from its initial pricing. It was the first Boston venture-funded technology company to go public in almost two years.
In March 2019, the WSJ reported on alleged lapses in the safety precautions taken during vetting of caregivers. In the same month, Care.com acted to remove unverified daycare listings from the site and to strengthen vetting procedures for members. The daycare listings removed had been generated automatically but never claimed by the facility owner. 
In December 2019, IAC announced it was buying Care.com for $15 per share, a 13.2% premium over Care.com's most recent closing price of $13.25, in a deal valued at almost $500 million. As part of the deal, IAC executive Tim Allen became CEO of Care.com when the acquisition was completed in February 2020, at which point Care.com ceased trading on the NYSE. 
Controversies.
Founding.
Immediately prior to founding Care.com Marcelo was an Entrepreneur in residence at Matrix Partners. While there, she and Matrix partner Nick Beim met with the founders of Sittercity.com and Sitters.com, two existing websites for finding caregivers which had been founded years earlier. The ostensible purpose of the meetings was to discuss a potential investment and bringing Marcelo in as CEO. Matrix Partners did not invest in either firm and, months later, Marcelo would found Care.com and receive $3.5 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, with Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn also participating in that round.
The situation has been cited as a notable example of venture capital firms misleading entrepreneurs they meet with and then using the information for their own benefit against the interests of the entrepreneurs. Mike Cravens, founder of Sitters.com, is quoted as saying that the meetings Marcelo and Beim had with him "were more than just a couple of meetings... the reality is that they did a deep dive into my company and then used that information to jump-start Care.com". Cravens furnished the Boston Globe with emails from Marcelo in which she tells Craven that she would not entertain starting her own business which would compete with Sitters.com.
Anne Raimondi, a spokesperson for Matrix, responded that: "We can appreciate that the companies in question do not like competition, but we do not believe that their claims of unfair treatment are at all merited because both Sheila and we said from the earliest discussions with these companies that we were considering competitive options and not to share any information with us that they were not comfortable sharing."
Allegations of insufficient background checks.
In 2015, "The Boston Globe" reported on the case of a local couple who found that the woman they had hired through Care.com as a nanny had stolen almost $300,000 over the year she worked for them by forging checks on the couple's personal accounts. The couple had paid $79 for a "preferred plus" background check that came back clean, despite the woman's lengthy history of fraud and theft arrests around the Boston area, a record the newspaper had been able to find using resources available to the public. While background checks in Massachusetts are more difficult to run than those in other states since court records are not available online, the "Globe" found other instances elsewhere in the U.S. where families were suing Care.com alleging negligence in properly conducting background checks, including two where the sitter hired was facing criminal charges over the death of the child they were hired to watch. 
In March 2019, "The Wall Street Journal" reported that claims by many day care providers listed on the site as licensed in their state were, false; at one in Tennessee a woman's twins had drowned, and other children had been abused, physically and sexually.
Customer service.
As of May 2021, the review site trustpilot.com showed a 1 star rating for Care.com’s customer service. Customer complaints included being unable to log in after paying, being charged more than once, and customer service ignoring emails.
Awards.
In 2013, the Care.com app Karoo received a Webby Award under the social (handheld devices) category. The app was later withdrawn. 