Magnify Ventures Closes $46.6M Fund II to Build AI Infrastructure for the Care Economy
Venture capital has spent a decade fixated on the categories where founders are most likely to be: enterprise software, fintech infrastructure, AI development tools, and consumer social. The care economy, the vast and mostly invisible network of services, products, and labour that keeps families healthy, financially stable, and supported through the phases of life that do not show up in a product roadmap, has received a fraction of that attention. Magnify Ventures was built to change that, and the Los Angeles‑based firm has now closed $46.6 million for its second fund to keep pressing into territory most of its peers still overlook.
The fund was announced on July 1, 2026. Limited partners include returning anchor Pivotal Ventures, the investment organisation founded by Melinda French Gates, which had anchored the firm's $52 million Fund I in 2022. New investors joining for Fund II are Jordan Park Group, a San Francisco‑based multi‑family office that manages approximately $18 billion for its clients, and Unum, the insurance and employee benefits company. The fund also carries financing from California's Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, commonly known as IBank, a public lender whose involvement in a venture fund is unusual enough to warrant notice. Foundations, funds of funds, family offices, and individual business leaders round out the LP base.
With the Fund II close, Magnify's total capital across both funds approaches $100 million, though the firm notes Fund II has not yet begun deploying capital.
What the Care Economy Actually Is and Why It Has Been Overlooked
The firm defines the care economy broadly, covering childcare, elder care, caregiving technology, family health management, household financial planning, estate and end‑of‑life planning, women's health, and the systems that run beneath all of those categories including insurance infrastructure, benefits platforms, and fintech tools for household wealth. A 2021 market analysis that Magnify helped produce estimated the combined addressable opportunity at $648 billion. By most venture capital standards, that figure should have attracted a flood of capital. It has not, which is the central premise of the firm's founding.
The reasons for the neglect are structural rather than incidental. Care economy markets tend to be fragmented, highly regulated, and populated by users who do not fit the profile of the early adopter demographic that most consumer technology companies target. Founders building in these categories are more likely to be women or caregivers themselves than to be recent computer science graduates with enterprise SaaS experience, which means they often fall outside the pattern‑matching algorithms of traditional venture investors. The people who use care economy products most heavily, caregivers, working parents, adult children managing ageing parents, and families navigating healthcare systems, are also not the people who show up most frequently in venture‑funded founder networks.
Co‑founder Julie Wroblewski brought personal experience of this gap into the founding story of Magnify. Before entering venture capital, she worked as a certified nursing assistant in rural Minnesota, which placed her directly inside the caregiving infrastructure that most investors have never encountered at ground level. Her co‑founder Joanna Drake brings complementary operational and investment experience. Together they built Magnify around the conviction that the care economy would eventually attract the capital it deserved, and that arriving early was an advantage worth the discomfort of being early.
The AI Argument and Why Now
Fund II's investment thesis centres on artificial intelligence as the accelerant that will finally unlock the care economy at scale. The firm's position is that several markets within the care economy have been structurally stagnant for decades, not because the need was absent but because the tools to serve that need efficiently did not exist. AI changes that calculation in ways that are specific to the category.
Magnify plans to back four types of companies with Fund II capital. The first is applied AI that reduces the invisible labour of running a household, covering everything from insurance claim navigation to school application management to scheduling coordination that currently falls disproportionately on the adults least able to absorb it. The second is agentic tools that improve the quality and reduce the cost of health and home systems, including home care coordination, clinical workflow support, and chronic condition management for patients managing care outside of hospital settings. The third is fintech infrastructure that modernises how families build and protect wealth, with a focus on the estate planning, family investment, and financial protection products that traditional fintech has consistently underdeveloped relative to their business equivalents. The fourth is healthcare, home, and workplace infrastructure designed for the modern family structure, which looks substantially different from the nuclear household that most existing benefits systems were built to serve.
The broader investment data supports the timing. Venture interest in the care economy has grown 45 percent over the past four years, with more than $26 billion deployed across more than 700 companies since 2015, according to research compiled by The Holding Co. in partnership with Pivotal Ventures. That represents a genuine acceleration even if the absolute numbers still fall short of the category's scale and importance relative to the total economy.
Fund I Companies and What They Proved
Fund I deployed $52 million into 21 companies, producing a portfolio that demonstrates what Magnify's thesis looks like in practice. Kinside, a childcare marketplace that helps families find, compare, and access subsidised childcare options, is among the most widely cited of those investments. Till Financial, which builds expense management tools designed for children and the parents who manage their money, addresses a gap at the intersection of financial education and household fintech. Alix provides estate settlement technology, reducing the administrative burden on families navigating the probate process and the distribution of assets after a death. Nolia Health focuses on caregiver support technology. Savi Security offers cybersecurity protection products designed for the household level rather than the enterprise.
Papa, a senior care company that connects older adults with companions and assistance through a technology‑enabled platform, was a co‑investment alongside Pivotal Ventures and has become one of the more visible companies in the elder care technology category. Pivotal Ventures has also backed Seen Health, another care economy company, reflecting the depth of alignment between its investment mandate and Magnify's focus.
Pivotal Ventures and the LP Relationship That Anchors the Firm
The relationship between Magnify and Pivotal Ventures is worth understanding in some detail because it goes beyond a typical anchor LP dynamic. Pivotal Ventures, as an organisation, does not purely write cheques into funds. It operates across investments, philanthropy, and policy advocacy with the goal of advancing women's economic power, and the care economy is the category where those three activities most directly overlap. Women perform a disproportionate share of unpaid and underpaid care work globally, bear more of the financial consequences when care infrastructure is inadequate, and represent a significant majority of the workers in the formal care labour market. A fund that backs technology companies improving care infrastructure is, by extension, a fund that directs capital toward the specific markets where women's economic position is most directly shaped.
Erin Harkless Moore, managing director of investments at Pivotal Ventures, described the care economy as one of society's most pressing issues and praised Wroblewski and Drake for the conviction it takes to build in a sector that has long been under‑resourced despite its size. That framing reflects how Pivotal Ventures thinks about its own role as an anchor LP: not just as a capital source but as a thesis validator in sectors where mainstream venture capital moves slowly.
The IBank Signal and What It Means for Public‑Private Fund Structures
California's Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank financing for a venture fund is an unusual structural detail that deserves attention. IBank is a public lender, not a traditional limited partner, and its involvement reflects a growing interest among state‑level economic development institutions in using capital deployment into venture funds as a tool for workforce development, regional economic growth, and the creation of jobs in high‑priority sectors. Care economy employment is one of California's largest and most structurally significant labour categories, employing hundreds of thousands of workers across home care, childcare, and community health services. An investment that helps scale the technology infrastructure for those services has a plausible connection to IBank's economic development mandate.
Whether the IBank model produces a replicable template for other states interested in directing public capital toward venture funds in socially important sectors is an open question that the Magnify partnership may help answer over time.
Fund II's deployment period is just beginning, which means the companies it backs and the returns it generates are still to come. What the close of $46.6 million demonstrates is that the care economy thesis has now survived two full fund cycles with meaningful institutional backing, that Pivotal Ventures believes in the strategy enough to return as anchor, and that new institutional LPs see enough in the care economy AI thesis to make their first commitment. Whether that is the beginning of a sustained reallocation of venture capital toward care economy infrastructure or another promising early chapter in a category that continues to be underfunded relative to its scale is what the next five years will determine.
