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Maven Clinic partners with Wellthy to support the 'sandwich generation' The companies will provide employees with clinical services and caregiving support to help them navigate fertility, family growth and eldercare. New York-based virtual women's health provider Maven Clinic announced a strategic collaboration with care concierge company Wellthy to combine clinical care and caregiving support for employees. Maven Clinic is a digital reproductive health and family platform that offers fertility and family planning services, pregnancy and postpartum care, parenting and pediatric support, and menopause-related care. Wellthy offers a care concierge service that connects employees with care teams to help them navigate the healthcare system, including finding in-home support, understanding benefits, accessing legal resources and obtaining financial assistance. The company also offers Backup Care services to help employees find emergency care for family members, including daycares, on-site childcare facilities and other community-based programs. The aim of Maven and Wellthy's partnership is to help employees in the "sandwich generation, - those in the period of starting a family and caring for an older loved one - navigate the process from fertility, growing a family and overseeing eldercare. "This partnership is about building a system that reflects how people live, with clinical care and caregiving support together in one place. When technology makes that support intuitive, you don't just improve outcomes - you make it possible for people to ask for help in the first place," Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven Clinic, said in a statement. THE LARGER TREND Maven Clinic has announced numerous partnerships over the past year, including a collaboration with health-tracking ring maker Oura that allows Maven's care teams to access Oura Ring wearers' biometric data, including sleep, stress and activity data. Maven also partnered with financial services provider Manulife Canada to give Manulife Group Benefits plan members access to its virtual women's health platform and Pinterest, offering the search and discovery company's employees access to mental health support, reproductive and family health specialists, and guidance on fertility, pregnancy, parenting and menopause. In 2024, Maven Clinic secured $125 million in Series F funding, bringing its total raise to more than $425 million. The round came two years after the company announced a $90 million Series E raise. In 2021, the company closed a $110 million Series D funding round, and in 2020 raised $45 million in Series C funding. Maven raised $27 million in Series B funding in 2018 and $10.8 million in a Series A round in 2017, bringing its total funding at the time to over $15 million. Meanwhile, last year, Wellthy acquired Patch Caregiving, which works with employers to design on-site and near-site backup childcare programs for employees. In 2024, Wellthy partnered with Guardian Life Insurance Company of America to offer caregiver support services to Guardian members with employer-sponsored disability insurance benefits. In 2023, Wellthy raised $25.5 million in funding, and in 2021, it secured $35 million in a Series B round.

Back-up care benefits at work go beyond kids, aging parents as more employers pay for pets. Published Sun, Mar 29 20269:51 AM EDT Key Points * Back-up care benefits companies like Wellthy and Bright Horizons now include pets in their programs, alongside children and elderly family members. * Wellthy first began offering pet back-up care in 2024 and added its "Pet Care Concierge" last summer to offer longer-term support, with around 50% of its corporate clients making it available to employees. * Around 75% of employees who own pets have missed at least a day of work in the past year due to pet-care issues, according to a survey from pet health-care company Wagmo. VIDEO 02:33 The employee benefit trending in a fully back-to-office world Pets are part of the caregiving process and employers are taking notice. As companies expand benefits to cover a wide variety of employee caregiving needs, back-up care for pets is becoming a more popular work perk along with back-up care for children and aging parents. Back-up care is short-term, often employer-subsidized support that is used when regular arrangements fall through. It's highly in need across the U.S., especially as more companies are mandating workers fully back to offices. A new report from the AARP Public Policy Institute finds that roughly 59 million Americans provided care for family, neighbors or friends in 2024, adding up to 49.5 billion hours of care and an estimated $1 trillion worth of work. At the same time, a growing body of data shows why pet care also matters to the workplace. A survey of more than 1,000 full-time employees who own pets found that 75% have missed at least a day of work in the past year due to pet-care issues, according to pet health-care company Wagmo, with 26% saying they missed six days or more. Caregiving company Wellthy, which offers back-up care across millions of employees and families nationally, and for clients including Best Buy, Merck and Harvard University, first added pets in 2024. "Where we're seeing the biggest growth area of our business is definitely on the back-up care side," Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, CEO and co-founder of Wellthy, told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in the latest episode of the "CNBC Changemakers and Power Players" podcast. "Companies will cover the cost for an employee to find a babysitter or a center for kiddos... but also for seniors and actually pets, too," she said. Wellthy expanded its pet back-up care offerings with "Pet Care Concierge," launched in summer 2025, which can help navigate pet insurance, source therapy animals, and find emergency boarding and local veterinarians. Around 50% of their clients offer the ability to use this service for their employees. Back-up care provider Bright Horizons also offers pet-care services through its partnerships with Rover and Wag!, typically providing walkers, sitters, and overnight boarding. At companies where Wagmo is a benefit, employees are reimbursed for routine pet care like vaccines, grooming, bloodwork, and exams. With the work-from-home flexibility of the Covid era - during which there was a surge in pet ownership - now over at many companies, there is more need among employees for day-to-day care and longer-term care with business travel. "We are seeing smart companies say 'we're going to do a return to office push', and ask folks to come back into offices. And we're also going to support them with their key personal logistics," said Jurist-Rosner. Pets fit within a broader national caregiving crisis. Pet care may not be the most acute need among many families caring for children with special needs and aging parents with health issues. It wasn't part of Wellthy's mission at the outset. Jurist-Rosner was motivated to found Wellthy by her experience helping to care for her mother, who had multiple sclerosis. "It was nearly a 30-year journey of navigating care for her. And she was my world. She was my best friend," Jurist-Rosner said. "And so I stepped in gladly into the role of caregiver, but it was tremendously hard and stressful and overwhelming for me... it's incredibly challenging for almost all families... and it felt like this burning need to go solve this problem for people like, people similar to me," she recalled during the podcast. There remain extreme shortages in child-care and senior-care staffing, as well as affordability challenges, Jurist-Rosner noted, with child-care "more expensive than rent in almost every market in the U.S. right now." "We're seeing the problem get worse and persist," she said. "I say people don't want to quit their families so they quit their jobs." The expanded availability of pet-care benefits does fit well within this broader mission of Wellthy to serve families in all of their needs, while reducing financial and emotional stress and improving productivity for employers. "We do find that most families are already stretched financially trying to pay for care and asking them to pay for another service on top of it feels like a lot. We get to be more accessible to more families. And for employers, companies get to improve retention, productivity," Jurist-Rosner said. "They get to have valued employees who might otherwise leave or need to take a leave of absence to handle their caregiving needs. I think this caregiving is kind of the under-discussed workforce equity, workforce productivity, and frankly, labor participation issue of our time." Follow and listen to this and every episode of the "CNBC Changemakers and Power Players" podcast on Apple and Spotify.

Wellthy has acquired Patch Caregiving to enhance its childcare services with on-site and near-site backup care solutions. This acquisition aims to support employees and families with flexible care benefits, particularly for industries with large shift-based or in-person workforces. Patch's model, founded in 2022, will now be part of Wellthy's expanding backup care offerings, helping employers reduce absenteeism and boost retention.