It started with a grandfather who just wanted to stay close.

It started with a phone call.

A father called his daughter with an idea he’d been turning over in his mind. He wanted to create books for his grandson — not generic books with a name swapped in, but real ones. Books with images of the two of them doing the things they actually did together. Cartoonized memories of days spent with grandpa and grandma: doing chores side by side, playing with toys on the living room floor, the small ordinary moments that make up a childhood.

His thinking was simple and pure: when grandpa couldn’t be there in person, his grandson could still hold those memories in his hands. He could open a book and see himself and his grandpa, together, on the page.

His daughter listened. And then her therapist brain started working.

She had spent over 15 years as a clinician — first in early intervention ABA therapy, then in performance and mental health. She understood, at a level most people don’t, what story does to a child’s developing mind. She knew that the most powerful intervention isn’t always the one that happens in a clinical setting. Often, the most powerful intervention is the one that happens quietly, in a child’s bedroom, at bedtime, in the pages of a book that makes them feel completely seen.

What if these books could do more than preserve memories?

What if they could meet children right where they are — in the middle of something hard — and help them find their way through?

That question became Sproutsi.

Sproutsi was founded by a father-daughter team who bring very different things to the same table — and that difference is exactly what makes the product work.

Our co-founder and resident therapist brings more than 15 years of clinical experience across early intervention, ABA therapy, and performance and mental health. She is the architect of Sproutsi’s book creation framework — a methodology grounded in evidence-based developmental and psychological science, designed to meet children at their emotional reality and walk them somewhere new. Every story Sproutsi creates carries the weight of that expertise. Nothing in the framework is accidental.

Our co-founder and chief builder brings the experience of raising a family — children, grandchildren, a deep and lived understanding of what parents actually face — along with the technical and business acumen to turn a beautiful idea into something real. He has built things before. He knows what it takes. And when his daughter said this could help a lot of kids, he believed her completely.

Together they built Sproutsi because they had seen, from both sides — the clinical and the personal — that children are more capable of growth than we sometimes give them credit for. They just need the right story at the right moment.

The more we built, the more we understood what Sproutsi could become.

In mental health, prevention is often the best treatment. Early intervention — reaching children before challenges become crises, before patterns become entrenched — is where the most meaningful change happens. And for young children, story is the most natural, most accessible form of early intervention that exists.

A Sproutsi book can help a child feel understood in a moment when they’re overwhelmed. It can model a new way of responding to fear, or change, or loss. It can give a parent the words they couldn’t find on their own — and take a little of the weight of the hard conversation off their shoulders.

But the vision goes further than any single book.

We built Sproutsi because we believe that the children who grow up feeling seen, emotionally fluent, and equipped with the skills to navigate hard things will be better prepared for everything — better friendships, better relationships, better ability to face the world’s complexity with resilience and grace.

When we help a three-year-old feel brave about starting school, we aren’t just solving a drop-off problem. We are building a foundation. We are contributing, in some small but real way, to who that child becomes.

That is what gets us out of bed in the morning.

The parent who lived through the tearful drop-offs, the potty training standoffs, and the meltdowns in the grocery store aisle — that parent knows things that no textbook can teach.

When Sproutsi works for your child, it works because you understood them. Because you knew what they were afraid of and how they tend to react and what they needed to hear. You didn’t just order a book. You built something.

And we thought: what if that something could help other families too?

Sproutsi’s creator storefront lets parents share the books they’ve made — on our platform or their own — and earn every time another family finds their way through the same moment. It’s a way of turning your hardest parenting experiences into something that helps someone else through theirs.

We believe in this community deeply. Parents helping parents. Stories traveling from one family to another, carrying the wisdom of lived experience inside them. That is, at its heart, what storytelling has always been for.