Tribecan Hera Li grew up speaking Mandarin and English and knew from the start that she wanted her children (now 5 and 3) to be bilingual. So of course she went looking for picture books for kids in Chinese — and was shocked at how little she found out there. In fact, just about nothing.

“The same quality of children’s literature that we have here in English exists in other countries but we don’t have access to them,” Hera said. “I guess generations of mothers just dealt with it — they would buy expensive products overseas and ship them or ask relatives to bring them in their suitcases.”

So she founded a company — Curio — that curates a selection books and takes care of all those logistics. A subscription-based service, customers get a quarterly delivery of three carefully selected books from award-winning authors across the globe.

Until she quit to launch Curio in 2023, Hera worked at fintech companies and other Silicon Valley firms, most recently at Slack, where she ran their search engineering team. (She has two degrees in computer science and engineering.) “But when I became a mother I wanted to solve real problems,” she said. “There are always ways you can optimize work, but I asked myself, what am I really passionate about?”

Curio offers subscriptions for readers of Spanish, Chinese, French and “Simplified Chinese” (as Hera explained, “the mainland designed its own writing system that is less complicated than countries like Taiwan and other Chinese diasporas. We see a lot of second generations brought up here are used to the simplified system. We just want to respect the differences”). You can get a “Bud Box” for ages 0 to 3 ($50 for three to four books), or a “Sprout Box” for ages 4 and up ($55 for three books). The boxes arrive every three months with reading guides to understand the story for parents who are not as strong in the language.

The company orders the books in bulk so they have the supply, and they keep improving the boxes using data from customer feedback. “It’s pretty tricky to say here are the books we think your kids will love,” Hera noted, “but we use book awards as a proxy and work with educators to select books.” The company also has a beta group of testers to see if they find it readable and interesting for their kids.

Each box is also focused on a social-emotional them, such as courage or relationships. “We want to almost have a curriculum as you go through each box,” Hera said.

It is her goal to be profitable — she knows the need is out there — but she also wanted to build the company with the understanding that a huge part of the population can’t pay $50 for books. So she is also partnering with NYU Langone’s Community Service Plan, supplying books for the families they serve at their family health centers in Brooklyn.

“Everyone knows it’s really good for your kids to grow up speaking a different language, and reading is such an important part of literacy building and bonding as a family,” Hera said. “We help bilingual families read with their kids.”