Child welfare runs on relationships. Binti's software exists so social workers spend less time on documentation and more time in rooms like this one.
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Felicia Curcuru built Binti to modernize child welfare. Now she's written the playbook every government AI vendor is looking for.
While Silicon Valley spent 2025 debating whether artificial intelligence would ever generate real revenue, a San Francisco govtech company was quietly collecting government checks. Binti—software built to modernize the U.S. child welfare system—reports that six of its product lines have each crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue inside one of the most risk-averse, slow-moving procurement markets in technology: local, state, and federal government.
The latest product to cross that threshold is Binti AI, making Binti one of the few companies to turn AI from hype into government revenue. Founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru didn’t stumble into this. She engineered it—one government contract at a time.
Curcuru’s background was in strategy and product—Wharton, McKinsey, then the first employee at FundersClub, a pioneering online venture capital firm.
Her sister adopted two children through a process so bureaucratically exhausting it bordered on punitive. “I made a list of the problems that I cared about in the world,” she explains. “This was at the top of the list because of my sister’s experience.”
Later, volunteering as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for foster youth in San Francisco, she watched a 9-year-old she was working with get placed in a group home because there weren't enough licensed foster families—not because families didn't want to help, but because the paperwork to become one was defeating people before they started.
She spent four months shadowing social workers in San Francisco before writing a line of code to map every manual step, every disconnected system, and every case file that disappeared when a caseworker changed desks.
The numbers behind what she found are not abstract. Child welfare agencies spent $34.3 billion in 2022. Approximately 330,000 children are in U.S. foster care at any given time. Between 31% and 46% will experience homelessness by age 26. Nearly one in five people in state prison reported spending time in foster care or a group home as a child. Meanwhile, the social work profession faces a projected shortfall of nearly 200,000 workers by 2030.
Binti launched in 2017. Today, the company reports its software serves roughly half of U.S. child welfare operations—more than 550 agencies across 36 states and the District of Columbia—and has helped more than 100,000 families navigate the foster and adoption process.
Felicia Curcuru, founder and CEO at Binti
Binti's software powers roughly half of U.S. child welfare operations, serving 550-plus agencies across 36 states.
VC-backed govtech companies don’t have the runway to wait out government procurement. By the time a state agency completes its RFP, clears compliance review, and signs a contract, a typical company may have already burned through its runway—which is why most VC-backed founders look at government opportunities, then walk away.
Curcuru built a go-to-market strategy designed specifically for that friction. Early products were priced below the threshold that triggers a formal RFP, allowing agencies to purchase without competitive bidding. Binti built its reference base at the county level before pursuing statewide contracts, then partnered with resellers to expand procurement access at scale.
Binti has also secured a General Services Administration Multiple Award Schedule contract—a federal procurement vehicle, active through 2040, that positions the company to sell directly to federal agencies without a separate competitive bid process, laying the groundwork for a federal market opportunity that remains largely untapped.
Binti reports that six product lines have each crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue: foster family licensing, case management, family finding, placement, service referrals, and AI. There are three more that have been built and will roll out shortly. Once those services have launceh, Binti is positioned to compete for statewide system replacement contracts that have historically gone to large IT integrators.
“We’re trying to be the first real software that isn’t just software that helps you enter data for reporting, but it actually helps you do your job,” Curcuru notes. “It saves you time. It gets rid of all the manual steps.”
Backed by Founders Fund, First Round Capital, Kapor Capital, and others, Binti has raised over $60 million to date, with Pivotal Ventures—Melinda French Gates’ investment firm—adding a $3 million direct investment earlier this year as part of what it describes as a broader “care thesis.”
By late 2025, AI bubble speculation had become standard fare in the business press. Investors demanded proof of revenue rather than proof of concept, and questioned whether the capital flooding into AI could ever justify its returns.
Binti AI recently launched into that environment—and crossed $1 million in annual recurring revenue anyway.
Built in collaboration with Anthropic through its AI for Good initiative, Binti AI is the company’s first-of-its-kind AI for social services. It is purpose-built for child welfare workflows, not adapted from general enterprise tools.
It automates the documentation work that consumes more than half of a typical social worker’s day: transcribing meetings, populating required forms, letting caseworkers search entire case files by plain-language query, each output held for human review before submission. One Scott County, Minnesota worker reported cutting home study completion time by 75%. The design is explicit: AI handles the paperwork, humans make every decision about children and families.
“By eliminating administrative bottlenecks that keep social workers stuck in paperwork, Binti frees up time for what matters most: supporting children and families,” notes Brittney Riley Gavini, director of investments at Pivotal Ventures. “Its technology is built for the reality of public systems and delivers accountability, efficiency, and measurable impact.”
In September 2025, Maryland’s Department of Human Services deployed Binti’s Family Finding module statewide. Within months, caseworkers completed more than 4,500 searches and identified over 4,300 potential kin connections for children in foster care, an average of 26 per child—in minutes. The state’s kinship placement rate rose 33%.
“Partnering with Binti is helping us innovate to drive up kinship placements statewide,” observes Maryland Interim Secretary of Human Services Gloria Brown Burnett. “We’re already seeing results.”
States from Arkansas to New York are using Binti’s products. In November 2025, Curcuru was invited to the White House for the signing of the “Fostering the Future for American Children and Families” Executive Order—an acknowledgment that Binti had crossed from software vendor to policy infrastructure. CNBC named her to its 2026 Changemakers: Women Transforming Business list in February. Inc. added her to its Female Founders 500 the same month.
The AI revenue question—the one consuming investment conferences and business press in equal measure—turns out to have a straightforward answer, if you're willing to operate where the competition isn't. Binti didn't wait for the government to become an easy customer. It built the compliance stack, the reference base, the federal reimbursement alignment, and the outcome data that government buyers require—and then it built the AI product on top of an installed base that wasn't going anywhere.
That sequence matters. The companies positioned to win government AI contracts are not the ones with the most sophisticated models. They’re the ones already inside the system, with compliance records, outcome data, and the trust of the agencies that use them. Binti built that, in the hardest market in tech, six times over.
The playbook exists. The question is who's paying attention.
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