Care Infrastructure Is The Foundation The Economy Stands On

"The care economy is the load-bearing wall of the American workforce, and it's been invisible in venture for too long," says Siran Cao, co-founder and CEO of Mirza, a Kalos portfolio company. It's a precise metaphor. Load-bearing walls are invisible until someone tries to remove them—and then the building falls.

The numbers make the structural case. Fewer than one in three parents say their employer helps with the cost of care, yet childcare access is one of the primary reasons frontline workers don't show up, and one of the primary reasons knowledge workers leave the workforce entirely.

The U.S. care economy—child care, elder care, family benefits, home healthcare—represents a $648 billion annual market that venture capital has treated as a rounding error, according to the landmark Investor’s Guide to the Care Economy, published by Pivotal Ventures and The Holding Co.

Bittner's portfolio is a map of where those walls are cracking.

• Mirza built a single-entry-point platform that helps workers navigate childcare subsidies, SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid—compressing what can be 16 separate government forms into a single process in some states.
• Tilt built AI-augmented software to manage the labyrinthine complexity of employee leave across 14—and growing—state paid family leave laws.
• Rosarium Health, the firm's newest investment, built a tech platform for home modifications that enable aging in place, addressing a demographic wave that U.S. infrastructure is wholly unprepared for.

"We chose Kalos Ventures as our lead investor because they immediately understood that the future of the care economy depends on strengthening both the workforce and the infrastructure that enables people to age safely at home," says Cameron Carter, co-founder and CEO of Rosarium Health.

Complexity Is The Moat, Not The Warning Sign

Most venture capitalists treat regulatory complexity as a reason to pass. Bittner treats it as a reason to move faster. Her logic is straightforward. If you can build it overnight, there is no competitive moat. If it requires years of institutional trust, regulatory expertise, and deep integration into existing HR and government systems, the barriers to entry are real and durable.

Tilt is the clearest illustration. Leave-management software touches every state employment law, every HR stack, and some of the most sensitive moments in an employee's life. That complexity is precisely why employers pay for it and why switching costs are high. The market is not niche. It's growing as state-paid leave legislation expands and companies face compounding compliance risks.

Mirza tells the same story from the benefits side. The company started with childcare navigation specifically because it was the most complicated benefit to navigate. That hard entry point gave the company the infrastructure to expand into SNAP, WIC, and housing benefits—complexity as a platform, not as a ceiling.

Investors poured $4.93 billion into HR and workforce technology in the first three quarters of 2025 alone, a 20% increase over the same period the prior year, signaling that the broader market is finally arriving at the same conclusion.

"As a first-time female founder building in HR tech, finding Ashley and Kate felt different immediately," says Jen Henderson, founder and CEO of Tilt. "They represent the future of venture capital: values-driven, founder-first, and deeply aligned with the long-term vision."

Conviction Over Consensus: The Fund Architecture Behind The Thesis

Bittner made her first care economy investment in 2018. The term "care economy" was not yet in common use in venture circles. She was not following a trend. She was building a thesis before the market had language for it.

That kind of early conviction requires a specific fund structure to support it. Kalos closed at $78.8 million—oversubscribed against a $75 million target. Bittner chose to keep the fund small. At that size, with a minimum of 15 investments, every company in the portfolio carries real weight. The firm runs weekly or biweekly working sessions with founders across three specific areas: capital formation, ecosystem development, and talent. This is not about introductions to other investors; it is about helping build and execute the full syndicate strategy for every subsequent round.

David Blake, founder of Degreed, a workforce learning platform in which Bittner led the Series C, put it plainly: "The highest distinction I can give a venture capital firm is that they act on the convictions of their own thinking rather than the social validation of what other firms are doing. Kalos has made it their model to often preempt rounds, which, by its very nature, means they must act by their convictions alone."

Preempting rounds is not just a tactical choice. It is a commitment to knowing founders before the market tells you whether to trust them. Bittner describes it as a business marriage: You want to know someone before you join their board for what may be a decade.

Erin Harkless Moore, Managing Director of Investments at Pivotal Ventures—one of Kalos’s LPs—describes what that specialist positioning delivers in practice: “As a specialist fund, Kalos Ventures’ approach equips founders with targeted tools, sector-specific expertise, and access to a network of seasoned advisors that enable them to overcome complex challenges. This is what companies need to scale their businesses with purpose and build real solutions across the future of work, care, and education.”

DOGE Created Tailwinds She Didn't Engineer

The most counterintuitive development in Bittner's portfolio has nothing to do with her investment strategy. The same political forces that are reducing public benefit programs have accelerated the growth of companies built to help people navigate what remains. HR1 and the broader push for government efficiency created new institutional demand for tech-enabled benefits navigation. That’s precisely what Mirza had spent two years building before anyone else recognized the opportunity. New entrants are arriving now. Mirza has the head start, the trust, and the infrastructure already in place.

This is what early conviction looks like in practice. The catalyst is unpredictable. The underlying need is not. "I've been looking to make an investment in childcare for years," Bittner said. "And early on, it was kind of looked at as not as attractive for other VCs at the time."

Now those same VCs are watching a company they passed on become the infrastructure layer for a government efficiency agenda, which they also didn't see coming.

The Underlying Forces Don't Change. The Solutions Do

When asked whether the window closes—whether more capital flooding into care and workforce infrastructure eventually prices out the early movers—Bittner's answer is telling. It won't close, she says. It will keep evolving. The underlying forces driving the thesis are not trends. Work is changing. Demographics are shifting. Those facts are not cyclical.

What changes is the form the solutions take. The companies Kalos is funding today are not the ones it will fund in a decade. But the macro forces underneath them—an aging population, a workforce reshaped by automation, a care infrastructure built for a different century—are structural. Venture capital spent years funding the furniture. The firms that generate returns in the next decade will be the ones that finally started funding the walls.

The $648 billion U.S. care economy has been systematically underpriced. Bittner has been making that argument since before it had a name. The market is finally catching up.