Famly, founded in 2013, has just closed a €15.9 million investment led by Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), SGE will be joining existing investors, including the founders of Zendesk and Just Eat’s ex-CEO.
The Copenhagen-based Famly gives parents a social feed to get photos and updates about their child’s day while helping childcare centres with managing the endless admin tasks involved in running their business.
An all-in-one SaaS platform for early childhood education centres, Famly saves teachers and administrators time on their back-office work and helps them communicate with parents, which translates into more quality education for the children.
CEO and co-founder Anders Laustsen: “Our mission from day one has been to help educators give their very best to their children every day and we will use this funding to help more educators do just that.”
The edtech company, founded by Anders Laustsen and Henrik Møller Rasmussen, currently works with 3,500 early education sites across the UK, Germany, Scandinavia, and the US, has over 400k parent users, and 63k educational staff users.
While parents want transparency, communication with their children’s preschools is too often stuck in the past, typically handled via a mix of group chats, emails and phone calls. On top of this, many early-childhood administrators still use antiquated business management methods – such as printed checklists or Excel spreadsheets – to handle everything from registration, enrollment, and occupancy to staff schedules and financial reporting. This leads to miscommunication between parents and teachers, mishandled invoicing, and less time for teachers to spend with children, because they’re overwhelmed with paperwork.
The result leaves parents with unnecessary worry, and over-burdened teachers with even more stress.
Famly’s platform gives parents a social media-style news feed with highlights from the day, as well as a place to message and collaborate with their children’s teachers to help them continue their education at home. Meanwhile, billing in the app makes paying tuition quicker and more secure – and stops educators from having to chase debt. Famly’s platform also helps centres run their business with ease, allowing them to see everything from the availability of care and financial reports to staff shifts and registers with nothing more than a few taps on a tablet.
Anders commented: “We’ve all heard it takes a village to raise a child, but for too long, the modern backbone of that village – nurseries, daycares, preschools, pre-kindergartens – haven’t been given enough thought or investment. We have a responsibility to support teachers with better tools, and to make sure they no longer simply keep parents ‘up to date’ with forgotten scrapbooks and email newsletters sent straight to spam. That’s why my favourite image of Famly is a blank tablet, screen off, job done, and a teacher back doing the important work with children.”
The company plans to use the new funding to double its headcount, expand its product-market fit in new markets, and open up to integrations and partners in the platform.
