From left: AIB's Cathy Bryce with TeachKloud founder and CEO Wendy Oke. Image: AIB
TeachKloud, which provides a SaaS platform for early-childhood educators, has raised €750,000 in a round led by Frontline Ventures.
Today (13 January), Cork-based start-up TeachKloud announced that it has raised €750,000, with investment led by Frontline Ventures and backed by the AIB Discovery Fund, along with funding from Enterprise Ireland, publishing company Folens and ed-tech investor Sean Tai.
The funding will be used to hire additional full-time engineering resources in Cork, while fuelling the company’s growth into the UK and US markets.
‘We’re particularly delighted to be supporting a business founded and led by a young female entrepreneur’
– CATHY BRYCE, AIB
TeachKloud, which is currently featured as Siliconrepublic.com’s Start-up of the Week, was founded by Wendy Oke during her PhD studies in early-childhood education, when she identified a significant gap in the software market.
She developed a cloud-based SaaS solution that enables educators to streamline different aspects of managing their work, complying with regulations and communicating with parents.
There are currently more than 15m children of preschool age in Europe and 1m childcare services in the US. Oke said that early-childhood educators in Ireland are spending between two and three hours on administrative efforts per day – which is impacting their ability to devote required resources to curriculum development and educational activities.
‘An area of explosive growth’
“Our platform is based on four key pillars,” Oke said. “Operational excellence, designed to deliver continuous monitoring of services; security to ensure confidentiality and integrity of customers data; reliability including secondary back-up devices; and performance efficiency, designed to adhere to our commitment on sustainability and energy, and automatically increase system resources only when workload demands exist.
“Our vision is to provide quality early-childhood education to every child – no matter who they are or where they come from – by empowering their teachers and parents to provide individualised learning and provide safer educational environments.”
Cathy Bryce, managing director of corporate, institutional and business banking at AIB, said that the bank is “delighted to be backing TeachKloud” through the AIB Discovery Fund. AIB’s assistance will enable the Cork-based start-up to scale internationally and grow its footprint in the ed-tech sector.
“We’re particularly delighted to be supporting a business founded and led by a young female entrepreneur as we look to encourage more women to showcase their entrepreneurial talents,” Bryce said.
Finn Murphy, principal at Frontline Ventures, added: “As primary caregivers continue to move more into the workplace, there is an increasing need for better support around childcare and education centres.
“We believe this will be an area of explosive growth as parents expect to get more updates related to the development of their children via mobile applications – this is a technology-enabled market that TeachKloud is uniquely positioned to lead.”
