The Future of Southeast Asian Family Care
Vanessa Purnawan MBA ’26 at Stanford helping build a startup tackling the childcare gap in Southeast Asia. Photo credit: Vanessa Purnawan.
This summer, I was awarded a grant from Cornell’s Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise (CSGE) through the Social Impact Internship Fund (SIIF), empowering me to help build NUOS—short for Nurturing, Understanding, Outstanding, and Safe Care for Families, an early-stage startup within the Stanford Impact Design Immersion Fellowship. Here, I collaborated with Losania Vernanda Hedianto, an MBA student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to address a problem at the intersection of social impact and family care in Southeast Asia.
At NUOS, my strategy and operations role focused on transforming an early-stage idea into a market-ready solution through caregiver sourcing, onboarding, and building the technology backbone.
What NUOS does
NUOS aims to close Southeast Asia’s care gap with a tech-driven childcare platform that verifies caregiver identities, offers certification to raise standards, and provides a transparent rating system with live support, helping professionalize Indonesia’s fragmented caregiver industry. Many women remain out of the workforce due to caregiving demands and limited access to affordable, trustworthy childcare, while parents often rely on informal networks or unvetted agencies, leading to inconsistent quality and safety. At the same time, the market’s reliance on informal babysitters likely contributes to underemployment, poor conditions, and risks of exploitation, including child labor.
NUOS aims to bridge this divide by providing:
- A trusted, inclusive caregiver matching platform: Background checks, a selection process, and professional caregiver training help match providers to parents’ specific needs.
- Standardized quality and pricing: Families know exactly what they are receiving for their investment.
- Career opportunities for caregivers: Providers receive fair compensation and chances to learn and earn.
- A tech-enabled backbone: Reliable platform provides secure background checks and vetting; AI-based training and monitoring; and transparent matching.
Our goal during the summer was to understand and validate the operational design; test both supply and demand in the marketplace; and run an end-to-end pilot to evaluate feasibility and scalability.
An eight-week sprint: Strategy, execution, and learning
The program condensed a semester’s learning into eight weeks focused on three key pillars:
- Caregiver sourcing: Our team focused on grassroots recruitment by engaging with vocational schools and trusted local references in Indonesia. By partnering with these local partners, we could test recruitment models and gain early feedback.
- Onboarding journey: Families and caregivers benefit when onboarding is smooth, transparent, and consistent. I developed a comprehensive onboarding journey that mapped every stage: initial outreach, skills verification, digital paperwork, certification, and placement. Key to our approach was recognizing regional diversity. Cultural expectations, regulatory requirements, and tech familiarity all vary across Southeast Asia. We worked to standardize the onboarding wherever possible but built in flexibility for country nuances.
- Tech backbone: Working with another intern, I developed the initial system architecture and minimum viable product (MVP), prioritizing three elements:
- Electronic know-your-customer (e-KYC) functionality: Conducting identity and criminal background checks to create trust and accountability for both caregivers and parents.
- Robust databases: Enabling secure management of candidate profiles, family requests, ratings, and certifications.
- Integrated payments: Simplifying transactions, tracking compensation, and enhancing transparency for all parties.
What’s next for NUOS?
This summer’s work set the table for our next milestones:
- Finalizing vendor and caregiver vetting standards: We are piloting new quality and background frameworks to raise confidence among families and ensure fair treatment for caregivers.
- Beginning a beta launch: Our upcoming limited beta—currently in partnership with select families—will test everything from pricing models to support workflows.
- Securing pre-seed/angel fundraising and planning expansion: Over the next few months, we hope to close our first round of funding to accelerate product development and expand our upskilling offerings for caregivers.
Our focus remains steady: building systems that work for real people; fostering trust in an often-overlooked sector; and pursuing sustainable, inclusive growth.
Personal takeaways: Impact where empathy meets execution
The SIIF internship was an intense, hands-on experience that deepened my understanding of Southeast Asia’s care markets and strengthened my strategy and operations skills while demonstrating how technology can drive meaningful impact. Entrepreneurial work is inherently unpredictable, and a key takeaway was that lasting change requires both empathy and discipline. When these elements align, families and caregivers benefit, and new, sustainable models of care can take root.
About the author
Vanessa Purnawan is a second-year MBA student at Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, originally from Indonesia. Before pursuing her MBA, Purnawan completed her undergraduate studies in finance and accumulated eight years of professional experience across consulting, banking, and technology sectors in Southeast Asia, China, Japan, and Australia. Passionate about technology’s potential to solve complex societal challenges in emerging markets, Purnawan is committed to fostering growth, collaboration, and positive change.