Kyle Reilly ’16 finds success with his business that offers entertaining child care virtually.

How do you take a break from your kids when the entire family is quarantining at home? When the coronavirus first hit in the spring of 2020, Kyle Reilly ’16 came up with a solution to the problem many working parents began to face.

Reilly, a client manager for a financial services firm, was looking for an idea for a start-up, and his girlfriend, Kristina Hanford, had just lost a gig performing on Broadway. Together, they realized they could connect the scores of laid-off performers with the kids who were cooped up at home.

The Virtual Babysitters Club (VBC) was born, offering hour-long Zoom sessions that featured professional singers, dancers, and actors who could entertain and engage children with puppet shows, dance parties, sing-a-longs, interactive games, and more.

“Parents were looking for an opportunity to focus and to have their kids do something fun and engaging that wasn’t just mind- numbing TV,” Reilly says. “VBC gives them the opportunity to have a guilt-free hour to get things done.”

They posted the idea on Facebook, and within days, they were overwhelmed by parents across the country who wanted to register their children for an online class. The business became a media sensation, with Reilly and his co-founder appearing on Good Morning America, CBS News, and Fox News.

One parent who signed up just after the company launched was Sarah Kahn, who was running a business consulting company with a 1- and 4-year-old at home in the San Francisco Bay area. Even though she had a nanny, she booked two classes a day so she could make business calls while her children were on Zoom.

“There’s not a price you can put on this,” says Kahn, who contacted seven virtual babysitting companies before choosing VBC. “It’s definitely given me some down time so I can do other work, and it’s given my children interaction with other children across the country, which I think is really cool.”

Besides attracting more than 1,300 parents to book sessions over the past two years, VBC has also worked with more than 25 companies that have signed up to offer free or subsidized sessions to their employees. One of the largest companies to purchase a package of VBC classes was Ocean Spray, the agricultural cooperative based in Massachusetts.

Each company signing up for VBC generates between 50 and 100 employees who try the service. “It’s a nice way to provide an employee benefit that is unique and modern in this crazy and challenging time,” Reilly says. “Few people could have guessed two, three years ago how many people would be working from home.”

Although the lockdown has eased up, VBC continues to draw parents looking for a way to engage their children online because the pandemic has made it difficult for parents to hire babysitters to come into their homes or even invite children over for playdates.

“The world has slowly opened up over the past year and a half, but we still have parents and kids who love the service, and they still use it,” Reilly says. “Sometimes that means the hours change, so if the kids are in virtual school, it’s an after-school thing.”

Reilly, who lives in Delmar, N.Y., with Hanford and their mini-goldendoodle, wants the company to keep growing, even if life returns to normal. Now that the platform is established, his focus is building the client base and raising capital to build awareness.

“We want to provide it for the parents who really enjoy an alternative to traditional means of entertaining their kids and for the performers who need something like this,” he says.