Last week Yoopies, a major player in the field of online childcare and home care services in France, announced that it raised €4 million in equity funding. The Series A round involved Runa Capital, an international venture fund with Russian roots, and Paris-based fund XAnge.
Runa brought in two-thirds of the funding amount, Yoopies’ CEO Benjamin Suchar told East-West Digital News.
Yoopies raised an additional undisclosed amount which was used to purchase the UK based company FindaBabysitter.
Launched in 2012, Yoopies started connecting parents and sitters through an online platform and then expanded to home care services. With more than 2 million users in France and beyond, the startup now claims to be the leader for childcare and home care services in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, and Spain.
Yoopies also has a corporate offer, which is used by such companies as Capgemini, Air France, SAP France, Publicis and Crédit Suisse. The startup plans to strengthen its corporate business with a new offer, ‘YoopiesAtWork,’ to be launched this fall.
Soon after its inception, Yoopies received €200,000 from angel investors; then in late 2014, the French startup secured an undisclosed amount from Babilou, a leading nursery company in France.
Runa, which targeted essentially Russian startups when launched in 2011, quickly switched to a global strategy. The fund has invested mostly in US startups, but also in a few French companies. Thus in 2012, the fund injected $1.5 million in mobile analytics startup Capptain, 18 months before it was acquired by Microsoft.
In February this year, Runa invested in Keymetrics. This startup has developed a SaaS monitoring service for server infrastructure, making it easier for developers to build Node.js applications.
Last month the fund announced its participation in a $4 million seed round for SimpliField, a French startup which has developed a SaaS solution for retailers.
