Sparrow Guided launch expands access to industry-leading leave management expertise. San Francisco CA (BUSINESS WIRE) - Sparrow, the leader in employee leave management technology, known for its Sparrow Concierge leave solution, today announced the launch of Sparrow Guided. This new offering brings the company's deep expertise in compliance and leave management to a broader range of organizations. The announcement was made at the Transform 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where Sparrow co-founder and CEO Deborah Hanus was featured as a speaker. Sparrow Guided joins the existing Sparrow Concierge, which provides white-glove leave administration, with Sparrow's leave specialists handling claims filing, follow-up, appeals, and even outreach to medical providers on behalf of employees and their HR teams. With the new Guided tier, employees file their own claims while receiving personalized, step-by-step direction from Sparrow's platform and continued access to the company's leave specialist team for complex situations. "Sparrow's mission is to make employee leave stress-free for everyone involved: HR, Payroll, managers, employees," said Hanus. "The question we kept asking internally was, how do we leverage what we've learned from tens of thousands of leaves and offer it in a way that's accessible to more people?" Sparrow Guided draws on Sparrow's years of direct claims-filing experience to power a tailored task management system that adapts to each employee's circumstances. The platform triggers customized instructions based on variables that most employers, and even many leave administrators, would never encounter on their own. Sparrow Guided automates routine tasks such as form-completion reminders and return-to-work check-ins, reserving Sparrow's human leave specialists for the nuanced, case-specific conversations. One example the company frequently cites involves the state of California, where employees whose names exceed 13 characters cannot file digitally through the state portal. Nothing in the portal's documentation explains the limitation. Employees try and fail without understanding why. Because Sparrow's specialists have filed thousands of claims themselves, they discovered the issue firsthand. They built it into the platform's logic so that affected employees are automatically directed to file on paper instead. The launch comes at a moment of significant growth and complexity in the employee leave landscape. Sparrow's 2026 The State of Employee Leave Benchmark Report, which analyzed more than 3 million days of leave, found that paid leave has shifted from a competitive perk to a baseline expectation across companies of all sizes. The report documented a 150% increase in caregiver leave claims since 2020, with the median duration of those leaves nearly quadrupling from 12.5 days to 49.5 days. Medical leave grew from 21% to 30% of all claims over the same period. At the same time, three new state paid family leave insurance programs have taken effect this year in Delaware, Minnesota, and Maine, with Maryland following close behind. That brings the national total to 14 active state programs, each with its own eligibility thresholds, benefit calculations, application processes, and coordination rules. For companies with distributed workforces, keeping up with those requirements has become a serious operational challenge. About Sparrow Sparrow is the first end-to-end leave management solution for modern employers to care for their people during major life events. Sparrow's high-tech, high-touch approach automates the most painful parts of employee leave management, while its world-class leave specialist team ensures a premium experience for all types of leaves across the United States and Canada. Caring companies, such as OpenAI, Reddit, and Chime, trust Sparrow to reduce compliance risks, enhance the employee experience, and contain costs. Learn more at sparrow.com. (C) 2026 Business Wire, Inc.

Sparrow, an employee leave management tech company, raised $35M in Series B funding led by Silver Lake Waterman, totaling $64M in investments. This funding addresses the growing complexity of workplace leave compliance due to varied state and local regulations. CEO Deborah Hanus highlighted the challenges of managing leave across multiple jurisdictions, exacerbated by remote work. The company aims to automate this process to ease the compliance burden on businesses.