Why Rukmini Banerjee Skipped Fundraising to Build Something Bigger

When Rukmini Banerjee stepped out of her COO role last fall, she didn’t expect a casual coffee shop conversation to ignite her next mission. But hearing firsthand about the emotional toll caregiving takes on busy professionals led her to co-create a solution. In this edition of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight series, Rukmini shares how she transformed a widespread problem into a purpose-driven startup—a mobile app that organizes caregiving with clarity and care, empowering families through life’s most demanding moments.

Hi, Rukmini! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

When busy professionals encounter a sudden health-related event for their parent, they need to assume the role of their parent's caregiver in order to ensure their parent's health, personal and household management needs are met. They would normally use tools like search engines, calendars, emails, phone calls and texts, but given the dramatic aging of our population, these tools no longer work because trying to stay organized with all the various tasks is time-consuming and cumbersome. If these problems are left unaddressed, then these family caregivers can burn out because their lives were already over-scheduled to begin with!

So we built a mobile app solution that helps busy professionals achieve peace of mind by helping them navigate and organize their aging loved one's care efficiently and with confidence. The pillars of impact we will deliver:

• Digitize & centralize
• Access to healthcare services
• Peripheral tools
• Care for the Caregivers

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

At a coffee shop with a friend last December, searching for holistic tools to help our friends who were/are struggling with the mental strain of caregiving, and finding none suitable, we said "let's do it ourselves"!

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

After transitioning out of my last role as COO in an insurtech startup last Fall, I was on a mission to network and figure out what the next opportunity will be - and the entrepreneurial leap happened fairly organically as I kept hearing about the different problems and stressors in this space for families.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

Honestly, the biggest game changer, or more accurately, game starter, was the free development and hosting credits we got from the Google Cloud program for startups. It really got us started when we were trying to assess if we understood the problem sufficiently to conceptualize and string together a workable solution.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

Pivot point: As soon as I had a prototype app built, I thought it was time to fundraise and I started spending time on that process. I then got accepted into a startup fellowship program here in town and very quickly learnt I was so not ready for fundraising yet! That was very helpful and taking a few steps back helped me gain much better clarity and the further validation/negation of some starting hypotheses really helped tighten my pitch.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

Work with a fairly large group of designers, developers, marketers and advisors from the very beginning who all worked for free, tirelessly donating their time and skills to help build out our beta version. Getting more heads in the beginning helped manage the risk of everything just being my idea, and allowed us to move forward without needing to raise any funds. The group is made up of people who believe in the mission and purpose and want to help. I am eternally grateful to all of them!

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

Demo-Sell-Build > Build-Demo-Sell

Want to dive deeper into Rukmini's work? Check out the links below:

• Visit CuroNow's website curonow.com
• Follow CuroNow on LinkedIn
• Connect with Rukmini's on LinkedIn: Rukmini Banerjee