Inside Harvard's Innovation Labs: Where X3P Is Building

X3P is featured on the Harvard Innovation Labs venture roster — alongside the cross-Harvard cohort of ventures the i-lab backs out of its Allston campus.

For us, the i-lab is not a trophy. It is a workbench.

Advisors, legal and technical workshops, a venture community that meets every week, and a campus full of people who think about hard problems for a living. We use all of it.

What the Harvard Innovation Labs actually is

The i-lab sits on the edge of the Harvard Business School campus in Allston. It is a cross-Harvard resource, open to ventures led by students, faculty, alumni, and partners from across the university. The teams that come through it span software, biotech, climate, education, and care. What ties them together is a bias toward building the future, not just writing about it.

Sitting inside that venture cohort means we get challenged by those teams. We get pushed by mentors who have built and sold companies, who have run policy, who have written the research papers our industry quotes back to itself. That kind of pressure tends to produce better products.

Why this matters for the work we do

X3P exists because the care economy is broken on both sides of the transaction.

• Families cannot find reliable, vetted help when they need it.
• Caregivers — the workers actually doing the job — are underpaid, undertrained, and rotated through agencies that treat them as interchangeable.

The standard playbook in this industry is to squeeze the worker harder. We think that is also exactly why the standard playbook keeps failing the family.

Our bet is the opposite one:

1. Pay caregivers properly.
2. Train them.
3. Match them with the right households using something better than a spreadsheet.
4. Give families a single place to book, manage, and pay for care — across adults, children, and pets.

The Weiner Center at Harvard Kennedy School recently published a case study on the early results of that approach, including a caregiver turnover rate roughly a third below the industry norm.

What the program sharpens for us

A few concrete things, in no particular order:

Expansion without dilution

Pressure-testing how we move into new metros without losing the quality bar we set in our first markets.

Smarter matching

Sharpening our caregiver matching model with input from researchers who work on labor markets and operations at scale.

Regulatory navigation

Talking to founders who have already walked through the regulatory side of healthcare and home services, so we do not have to learn every lesson the expensive way.

What comes next

We will keep sharing what we learn here.

The point of being in a place like the i-lab is not to collect a logo. It is to build something that holds up when families actually depend on it.