When Joanna Aguilera found out her 6-year-old son would be transferring to a new school in Englewood, she was excited but anxious. The Denver day care, which shuttled Aiden to his old school, didn’t go to Englewood.

And as a single working mother, she couldn’t leave her job to transport him back and forth twice a day. So, she went online.

“I just Googled ‘Uber for kids,'” said the Denver resident. “And the first thing to come up was HopSkipDrive.”

The Los Angeles-based company began shuttling kids around the Denver area this week. It’s the first ride-sharing service approved by state regulators to focus on unaccompanied minors. And unlike Uber and Lyft, the kid-friendly service goes beyond minimum background requirements and only works with drivers who have five years of child care experience — and are willing to get fingerprinted.

Aguilera booked the service for two months out.

“It’s hard when we’re single moms and we have to be at work but our kids have to be in certain places,” she said. “And it’s great they have child care experience.”

A growing number of kid-focused ride-sharing services have popped up nationwide, although many haven’t expanded beyond their home states. Boosted by today’s familiarity with ride sharing and working parents juggling multiple kids and activities, the rise of this premium business is also a tiny part of the booming ride- and car-sharing market, which is forecast to grow globally to 160 billion rides by 2026 compared to last year’s 12.4 billion, said Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst who tracks ride sharing for market researcher Navigant. The child niche is “probably less than a percent,” he said. But it’s still early. Some have even gone out of business, including Shuddle, which shut down in 2016,

There is definitely a need for a children-focused service in Colorado, said Liz Oertle, the CEO and co-founder of Nanno, a Denver-based service that connects nannies, babysitters and other child care professionals with parents.

“We get a lot of requests for (rides), and it tends to be from parents of kids who are on the older end of the spectrum,” said Oertle, a stickler for car seats who doesn’t even trust friends to drive her babies (“Maybe when they’re 10,” she said). “In the later stage of childhood, you need someone to drive them around. … I would love it if there was a service here (to refer customers).”

HopSkipDrive doesn’t provide car seats and only carries passengers ages 6 and older. Booster seats are available.

Uber — which, along with Lyft, doesn’t accept passengers under 18 unless they’re with an adult — tested the idea of shuttling teenagers. But its Uber Teen pilot has ended.

“We’ve taken those learnings to think about how we can best serve families now and into the future,” said Stephanie Sedlak, an Uber spokeswoman.

Greg Bettinelli, a partner with Upfront Ventures and investor in HopSkipDrive, said the company steps in where others haven’t done a good job. He pointed to half-empty school buses since kids don’t go straight home anymore. Hiring a nanny to chauffeur kids around means paying for set hours, including when the child is elsewhere. There’s also a disruption to a parent’s job.

“If you look at the amount of money parents spend on transportation for their kids, … there are tens of billions of dollars in demand already in the system. It’s just spent in different ways,” Bettinelli said. “There’s an appetite for this solution or iteration of it.”

HopSkipDrive, started by three moms in Los Angeles in 2014, is one of the better funded companies, having raised $22 million from investors. Two San Francisco-area competitors include Zūm, which has raised $26.8 million, and Kango, which recently partnered with Chrysler.

“We’re three moms. We have eight kids between us that go to five different schools and have 25 different after-school activities. We were struggling with how to make it work. We built this with our kids in mind,” said HopSkipDrive CEO Joanna McFarland. “We think about safety before the ride, during the ride and after.”

With more than 2,000 drivers, HopSkipDrive has more strict requirements than most services. All drivers are interviewed in person, must have child care experience and are fingerprinted — an action not required by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, which in February approved HopSkipDrive’s permit to operate in the state.

The other two approved ride-sharing services in Colorado, Uber and Lyft, call fingerprinting an incomplete screening method and have pulled out of cities forcing the issue. But critics say the extra security layer is necessary and might have helped Uber avoid a fine by the state for having drivers with felony convictions.

Besides, said McFarland, this is about the most vulnerable population: children. HopSkipDrive became the first ride-sharing service to fingerprint.

The service monitors its orange-shirted drivers and texts parents throughout the ride, and sends parents the driver’s profile and picture ahead of time. It creates a secret code that drivers and passengers use to identify one another. It also requires eight hours’ advance notice to get approvals from schools. Rides start at $15 and allow for carpools (starting at $6 a family) and multiple stops. Rides can be scheduled at anytime of day or night but the 8-hour time minimum means this as a not an on-demand, last-minute emergency ride service.

After hearing about HopSkipDrive on a business trip, Lakewood resident Rhetta Shead booked a ride for her 15-year-old daughter, Gabriella, to get to ballet class on Tuesday. Shead’s older daughter, who’s in college, uses Lyft or Uber to get around. But letting Gabriella do the same didn’t feel right, so Shead and her husband would take turns shuttling her around. Shead stuck around for Gabriella’s first ride.

“When I talked to my daughter, she said the woman (driver) was so nice and was catering to her likes. They talked about the music and she adjusted her radio to what my daughter likes, Broadway show tunes. Just knowing your kid is with someone who really understands and gets kids and is not going to be rude (helps),” Shead said. “I think I enjoyed it more than my daughter did because I finally felt relaxed, I finally felt comfortable.”

Denver is HopSkipDrive’s first city outside of California. And it was picked for several reasons, McFarland said.

“Denver has highly active families, and with school choice, families have a lot of options. Everybody wants what is best for their children, and that’s not always the school down the street. There’s a huge opportunity for us to enable school choice by enabling the transportation piece of getting kids to the school,” McFarland said. “It’s also where I grew up.”

Update April 5, 2018 at 11:10 a.m.: This story was corrected to clarify that HopSkipDrive takes ride reservations 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But customers must request rides at least eight hours in advance. For early morning pickups, customers must schedule it by 7 p.m. the night before.