SCHOOLZE

Schoolze is a context-based school success platform for K-12. Schoolze started as a simple messaging and newsletter scheduling web-app for a Pacific Grove preschool class in early 2015 with an objective to make parental communication and field trip photo sharing, private, secure and easy. The response we received from local parents and teachers was overwhelming, and the site witnessed 70%+ returning parents who visited the website every day. Intrigued by the engagement site generated, we went ... in researching the impact and found that for various reasons, our schools (and students) do not get enough parental involvement and that this lack of engagement is responsible for problems such as teen depression and high drop-out rates in high schools. Looking at the early traction, our founder, Avneesh Kumar quit his consulting director job and started building and scaling Schoolze full time with a mission to help schools increase parental engagement in a measurable way. He also initiated research in the classrooms to find key factors on how parental engagement leads to higher student achievement. In July 2015, Avneesh brought in his long-term colleague and friend Nirmal Kannan as a co-founder and technology head. This turned out to be a crucial decision in the history of the company, as Nirmal transformed the platform into an engagement analytics platform and added much-needed fundraising options later. In building and scaling of Schoolze, we learned pretty early that almost every school needs funds to help students achieve more. This was what lead to critical insights which became paving stone for Schoolze becoming a fundraising platform. Today, Schoolze has proudly built technology which saves time for teachers, generates money for schools & education institutions, and provides actionable parental engagement insights to school and district administrators. Schoolze is currently working on linking the parental engagement to student achievement in the area of early childhood reading and writing and also aspires to make a parental advocacy product in 2017.More