Caribu helps parents, grandparents, and extended family to read, draw, cook a recipe, enjoy an art activity, and play games with their (grand)children, in an interactive video-call, from anywhere in the world. The result is an engaging child-friendly shared screen experience that is elegantly designed, carefully curated, and secure. Caribu contains an in-app library filled with thousands of titles from leading children’s publishers, in 10 languages, and coloring activities that can be drawn on simultaneously. The company has users in 200+ countries/territories, has won numerous international and national awards such as being named one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions, and is backed by celebrity investors and great partners such as AT&T, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, and Toyota. Through a partnership with Blue Star Families, Caribu donates free subscriptions to all currently serving U.S. military. For more information, visit: www.caribu.com
Founder Story Maxeme Tuchman is a Jewban (Cuban-Jew), who is the daughter of immigrants, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and the first in her family to graduate from college. Her family is the personification of the American Dream and she feels an incredible burden to pay it forward to them and to this country that has given them so much. Growing up, her family always said that when they fled from country to country, their informal education is the only thing they could take with them. And that “education” was the most important resource to building a new community and career each time in their new homeland. Max lives to make her family proud and to have a positive impact in the world. She has continuously been working on something education focused because to her that is the great equalizer.
Before co-founding Caribu, Max was appointed by President Obama to serve as a senior policy advisor and White House Fellow at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In this position, she worked on issues of financial inclusion and student loans. Prior to that, she served as the Executive Director of Teach For America Miami-Dade and was responsible for overseeing daily regional operations for 26 staff members and cultivating over $15M of private and public support in service of over 500 teachers and alumni.
Earlier in her career, she served in Mayor Bloomberg’s bullpen where she co-created the NYC Civic Corps and managed The NYC Waterfalls art installation, bringing in $69M of economic impact to the city. Her commitment to educational equity began very early on in life, but it really amplified when she was a Teach For America corps member, teaching 480 high school students in inner-city Miami. That experience led Max to work on educational innovation projects with organizations such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, DC Public Schools, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Max truly believes that it was all of the skills she picked up in her “past lives” that have helped her become an entrepreneur. Every day she has to create something out of nothing, make decisions with incomplete information, wear multiple hats (and pretend she is an expert in all of them), manage and recruit teams, then make and raise money.
