Six products. Six million dollar milestones. One market that most founders won’t touch

Felicia Curcuru built Binti to modernize child welfare. Now she has written the playbook that every government AI vendor is looking for.

In 2025, while Silicon Valley debated whether artificial intelligence would ever generate real revenue, a San Francisco government company was quietly cashing government checks. Binti – software built to modernize America’s child welfare system – reports that six of its product lines have each exceeded $1 million in annual recurring revenue within one of the most risk-averse, slow-moving purchasing 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 turning AI from hype into government revenue. Founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru did not end up in this. She designed 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 as to be almost punishing. “I made a list of the problems in the world that I cared about,” she explains. “This was at the top of the list because of my sister’s experience.”

Later, while volunteering as a court-appointed special advocate for foster youth in San Francisco, she watched as a 9-year-old she worked with was placed in a group home because there weren’t enough licensed foster homes — not because families didn’t want to help, but because the paperwork to become one defeated people before they even started.

She spent four months with social workers in San Francisco before writing a line of code to map every manual step, every disconnected system, and every file that disappeared when a worker switched desks.

The numbers behind what she discovered are not abstract. Child welfare organizations spent $34.3 billion in 2022. Approx 330,000 children are in American foster care at any time. Between 31% and 46% will become homeless at the age of 26. Nearly one in five people are in state prison reported spending time in a foster home or group home as a child. Meanwhile, the The social work profession is facing an expected shortage of almost 200,000 employees in 2030.

Binti launched in 2017. Today, the company reports that its software serves about half of U.S. child welfare operations – more than 550 agencies in 36 states and the District of Columbia – and has helped more than 100,000 families navigate the foster and adoption process.

Venture capital-backed govtech companies do not have the option to wait for government orders. By the time a government agency completes its RFP, approves its compliance review, and signs a contract, a typical company may have already burned through its runway. That’s why most VC-backed founders look at government opportunities and then walk away.

Curcuru developed 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 referral base at the county level before entering into statewide contracts, then partnered with resellers to expand access to purchasing at scale.

Binti also won a General Services Administration Multiple Award Schedule contract – a federal procurement tool, active through 2040, that positions the company to sell directly to federal agencies without a separate competitive bidding process, laying the foundation for a federal market opportunity that remains largely untapped.

Binti reports that six product lines have each achieved $1 million in annual recurring revenue: foster care licensing, case management, family finding, placement, service referrals and AI. Three more have been built and will be rolled out soon. Once these services are launched, Binti will be positioned to compete for statewide system replacement contracts, which have historically gone to large IT integrators.

“We’re trying to be the first real software that’s not just software that helps you enter data for reporting, but actually helps you do your job,” notes Curcuru. “It saves you time. It eliminates all the manual steps.”

Backed by Founders Fund, First Round Capital, Kapor Capital and others, Binti has raised more than $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 the end of 2025, speculation about AI bubbles had become the norm in the business press. Investors demanded proof of revenue rather than proof of concept, wondering whether the capital flowing into AI could ever justify its returns.

Binti AI recently launched in that environment and has surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue anyway.

Built in partnership with Anthropic through the AI ​​for Good initiative, Binti AI is the company’s first AI for social services. It is purpose-built for child welfare workflows and is not adapted to general business tools.

It automates the documentation work that takes up more than half of an average social worker’s day: transcribing meetings, filling out required forms, searching entire files through simple searches, with each output saved for human review before submission. An employee from Scott County, Minnesota reported that he had reduced the turnaround time of home studies by 75%. The design is explicit: AI handles the paperwork, humans make every decision about children and families.

“By removing administrative bottlenecks that keep social workers bogged down in paperwork, Binti frees up time for what matters most: supporting children and families,” said Brittney Riley Gavini, investment director at Pivotal Ventures. “The technology is built for the reality of public systems and delivers accountability, efficiency and measurable impact.”

In September 2025, the Maryland Department of Human Services implemented Binti’s Family Finding module statewide. Within months, decision makers completed more than 4,500 searches and identified more than 4,300 potential relatives for children in foster care, an average of 26 per child – in minutes. That of the state kinship placement rate increased by 33%.

“Working with Binti, we can innovate to increase kinship placements statewide,” noted Maryland Interim Secretary of Human Services Gloria Brown Burnett. “We are already seeing results.”

States from Arkansas to New York use 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 – a recognition that Binti had made the transition from software provider to policy infrastructure. CNBC named her to the 2026 Changemakers: Women Transforming Business list in February. Inc. added her to the Female Founders 500 the same month.

The AI ​​revenue question – occupying investment conferences and the business press alike – turns out to have a simple answer, if you’re willing to operate where the competition isn’t present. Binti did not wait for the government to become an easy customer. It built the compliance stack, the reference base, the federal reimbursement reconciliation, and the outcome data that government buyers need – and then it built the AI ​​product on top of an installed base that wasn’t going anywhere.

That order is important. The companies positioned to win government AI contracts are not the ones with the most advanced models. They are the ones already in the system, with compliance data, outcome data and the trust of the agencies they use. Binti has built that six times in the toughest technology market.

The script exists. The question is who is paying attention.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com