Recursion Building On-Site Child Care Facility to Support Working Parents

November 21, 2019 – Recursion, a tech-enabled biopharma company combining automation with artificial intelligence to discover novel treatments that expand our collective understanding of biology, announced today it will open an onsite child care center in partnership with Bright Horizons to support working parents and ensure its people have access to convenient, affordable child care.

While securing affordable and accessible child care is difficult for parents nationwide it is especially challenging in Utah, dubbed the country’s "child care desert" for the fact that only one in four children are guaranteed to find an opening in a care facility. This rings true for Recursion CEO and Co-Founder Chris Gibson, Ph.D., who almost didn’t start Recursion when his family was faced with a child care challenge:

"Recursion almost didn’t happen. My wife, a physician, was already on a great career path and when we had our first child we were faced with a serious dilemma; with no child care immediately available to us, we would have adapted our careers in a way that would not have enabled me to take the risk I did in starting Recursion. In a lucky turn of events, we got off a waiting list just in time, but that experience stuck with me as an example of the challenge of being a working parent, while also providing a loving setting for your child’s growth. I knew then that as soon as we could, we would open an onsite child care facility at Recursion to help alleviate this critical challenge for our team."

Added Gibson: "Today, in our sixth year as a company, that aim is realized as we partner with the best national child care operator, Bright Horizons, to build a facility that is going to ease the anxieties of working parents and enable Recursionauts to continue to do the best work of their lives."

Bright Horizons is the country’s largest provider of employer-sponsored child care. While the organization serves about 400 employers nationwide, it is exceedingly rare for a company of Recursion’s size and stage — 160-plus people and post-Series C financing — to build an onsite child care facility.

"We’re a company whose mission is to do the previously unimaginable; decode biology to radically improve people’s lives and chart a new path for drug discovery that layers in the most advanced technologies," said Heather Kirkby, Chief People Officer. "Because of this we need to recruit our people from all over the world and we need to create an environment that cultivates a deep sense of belonging — a starting point to unleash exceptional teamwork. Adding onsite child care helps us attract and retain top talent while signaling our commitment to inclusion and our desire to make people feel supported both at work and outside."

The new child care facility will open in the second half of 2020 and be adjacent to Recursion’s headquarters at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City. In addition to meeting the needs of its workforce, Recursion will open up unused capacity to the local community. More details will be announced in 2020 when the new site opens.

For more information on Recursion’s unique approach to applying artificial intelligence and automation to drug discovery, visit www.recursionpharma.com.

Shared with permission from Recursion.