Sheila Lirio Marcelo
Operator · Fundraising
“The people most affected had no time to build the solution, and the people with capital had not lived the problem.”
Bio
Sheila Lirio Marcelo is a Venture Partner at Suncoast Ventures Fund II. She brings exit-tested operator credibility, an IPO track record, and a builder's network. Her thesis at Suncoast: back the founders solving the care problems that the broader market has consistently underestimated.
Sheila is the Founder of Care.com, which she took public in 2014 before its sale to IAC in 2020. She is currently the Co-Founder and CEO of Ohai.ai, an AI-powered virtual household care assistant for families.
She has been named to Fortune's "Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs" and Forbes 50 Over 50, is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum. She holds a JD and an MBA with honors from Harvard.
Based in NYC, Sheila continues to back the next generation of founders building the infrastructure for how families actually live and care for each other.
Backstory
I built Care.com out of my own experience navigating the impossible logistics of finding care for my family — for my children, and for my parents as they aged. The market was enormous and obvious in retrospect, but it had been overlooked for the same reason most family-care problems are: the people most affected by it had no time to build the solution, and the people with capital had not lived the problem.
Care.com became the proof that the household and care economy was a real, scalable category — and that founders building for it deserved the same caliber of capital and craft as any other technology category. Taking it public in 2014 and exiting to IAC in 2020 was both the validation and the start of the next chapter.
Now I'm building Ohai.ai and helping Suncoast back the founders solving the household, family, and care problems the broader market keeps underestimating.
What I'm looking for
Founders building the infrastructure for how families actually live and care for each other — the household and care economy the market underestimates.
Exit-tested operator instincts: a builder's network, a real GTM, and the grit to take a category from overlooked to obvious.
Focus
Press & media
Article · Fortune
Fortune — Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs
Article · Forbes
Forbes 50 Over 50
Companies