Joan Nguyen is the co-founder and CEO of Bumo, the on-demand childcare platform she launched in 2019 with co-founder Chriselle Lim. Raised by Vietnamese refugee parents who taught her that education is the ultimate equalizer, she founded her first company, the tutoring and test-prep business MeriEducation, at age 20 with $3,000 in savings and grew it into an Inc. 5000 company.
Bumo grew out of Nguyen's own experience as a working mother of two, including the all-too-familiar scramble to find reliable, last-minute childcare between meetings. After the pandemic forced the company to pivot from its original co-working-with-childcare concept into a virtual preschool and then an on-demand marketplace, she and Lim raised millions in seed funding from investors including Jessica Alba and grew Bumo into a platform connecting parents with thousands of licensed providers.
