CareLulu, one of four companies that are about to emerge from The Startup Factory’s accelerator program, hopes to be the Kayak of daycare.

Need childcare to meet your specific needs?

CareLulu’s founder (a chemical engineer by trade) believes his company has a secret sauce that will help parents, daycare providers and investors cash in on a big, multi-billion dollar opportunity. The four-person company has offices in Durham and Washington, D.C.

WRAL TechWire has the exclusive interview with Patrick Matos for our Insiders.

  • There’s a Lulu Press in Raleigh led by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young. How did you settle on LuLu as part of your name?

Ha! We get this question all the time

When people hear the name “CareLuLu”, they often think “LuLu” is French (maybe because I’m French…) Or, they think we chose it because it sounds cute and fun.

There’s actually a real meaning behind it: “Lulu” is an English word which means “a remarkable person or thing.” We thought that was perfect since our goal is to help parents find remarkable care for their little ones. And yes, we also think it’s cute!

  • Why you decided to launch this company?

I’m a chemical engineer by training (grew up in France, studied at INPG in France, and UC Berkeley here in the US), I’ve worked for 10 years as an engineer, project manager & consultant in the US and Europe, and have product and biz dev experience. I also co-founded a startup prior to CareLuLu. But the background most relevant to CareLuLu is that I’m a dad of 2 (2 and 4 years-old girls.)

My wife and I went through the lengthy and painful process of finding child care for our 2 daughters. When we were looking for a daycare center, we expected to find a website or an app that would help us find the right place for us (just like there’s Kayak to find a flight, or Zillow to find a new house.) All we found were child care “directories” with a list of daycares: there was little information available on the daycares, and no way to search through the list.

So we ended up calling dozens of places asking the same questions, over and over again (just to know basic things like hours and cost.) It took hours of online research, then phone calls, and eventually 16 visits in-person to find the right place. After talking to other parents, we realized that this was a major issue for most families.

I then researched the market and realized that this was a massive, yet underserved market, so we decided to start CareLuLu.

  • How did you and your partners meet?

The founding team include myself (CEO), Gabriel Marques (CTO), and Evgeniya (Jen) Usmanova (CMO). Gabriel and originally met online a few years back on a startup related website (can’t remember which one!) We eventually co-founded a startup (prior to CareLuLu) so we’ve worked together in the past.

Gabriel is a software engineer (he was the first software engineer at Groupon in Brazil.)

Jen and I met in college (UC Berkeley). Besides being my co-founder, she’s also my wife. We encountered the problem and came up with the idea for CareLuLu together.

Jen has marketing expertise (founded a magazine at 16) and worked for a number of organizations (most recently before CareLuLu, she was at American Councils for International Education where she was working on fostering entrepreneurship across Russian/American universities.)

  • Why target this opportunity?

In 2013, child care was a $48 billion industry. While there are a number of great websites to help parents find babysitters or nannies, daycares and preschools are an underserved vertical (licensed businesses, as opposed to individuals, including home daycares and child care centers / preschools).

A lot of daycares are not online yet, and don’t know how to market themselves well. This leads to the struggle I’ve described for parents trying to find the,. So there’s a painful situation on both sides. The existing solutions (i.e. child care directories) were not properly serving parents, and given the massive opportunity, we decided to go after it.

  • What’s the secret sauce?

Well… It’s secret! I bet you got this one before.

No seriously, our secret sauce is that CareLuLu is the only tool that helps parents avoid the hassle of spending hours doing research online and calling daycares. On CareLuLu, parents can find all the information in one place, including tuition rates, photos and reviews by other parents.

We also offer parents a personalized search to easily identify daycares that their family’s specific needs in terms of budget, hours, child’s age, or even something as specific as a peanut-free environment (as opposed to calling a list of centers to ask if they accept 3 month-old babies!)

There’s truly no resource that simplifies the daycare search process like CareLuLu. Seriously, we’ve been called “a tool to help parents save time and sanity.”

Note: There’s more to come from CareLulu. In the second part of our Q&A, WRAL TechWire talks with Matos about The Startup Factory experience.