The childcare industry is one of the most competitive in America, and the key to success is to create more personalized experiences. A company called Kangarootime found inroads to this as the first modern mobile and web operating system for daycare centers. They also cover schools and camps for further comprehensiveness.
Founded by CEO Scott Wayman two years ago, Kangarootime is a Graduate of the Los Angeles Founder Institute, and they just won $500,000 in the 43North Startup Competition, one of eight finalists to win a prize out of over 500 competing companies. Kangarootime's prize also includes free incubator space in Buffalo, New York for one year, guidance from mentors, and access to other business incentive programs to eight startups from around the world.
Take a look at the future of Scott's company, including some background on the founder himself.
What is the Goal of Kangarootime?
The company continues to maintain a goal of letting daycare centers, camps, and schools finally move away from paper. They accomplish this through automation in the app. With these tools, daycare center managers can finally use their time for other things rather than handling overwhelming paperwork.
One of the app's highlights is its ability to automate payments and billing to remove any possible discrepancies on paper. Automation is also applied to scheduling and attendance, preventing further mistakes from ever occurring.
Thanks to full document management strategies, they've become a leader in helping daycare workflows become more convenient for staff, students, and parents.
Background on Scott Wayman
The relevant experience of Scott Wayman was already extensive when he decided to start Kangarootime. With 17 years of experience in sales, marketing, and business development, Scott had a Vice President of Marketing title at Medstreaming before 2015. While there, he founded the EMR business unit.
He also had a personal reason for founding Kangarootime. A decade ago, he lost his family and had to become legal guardian to his 10-year-old brother. Scott's experience working in the healthcare field made him see an underserved market in child care.
Taking from the digital records system he created for healthcare, he created a similar system for managing daycare centers.
Advancing the Company
Providing a digital way to take care of billing and scheduling in child care is already a strong selling point. However, Scott has worked hard to keep making it a convenient app since going live.
Recently, they partnered with Unity FI Solutions, a company providing payment and software processing solutions. This partnership is going to streamline the online payment process Kangarootime already provides parents.
Soon, users of the app can use a one-stop shop for all payment matters without having to put up with clunky online systems.
What is the Future of Kangarootime?
Despite some child care apps already out there as competitors, Kangarootime's advantage for the future is in its simple design and functions. Ultimately, this allows parents to pay daycare, school, or camp bills in seconds.
Plus, with recent seed funding from several big companies, the push is on to make Kangarootime a leader in its field.
Scalability is already a major part of Scott's app, and they're beginning to demonstrate how this works. They certainly do well in users when you consider they had 2,000 downloads in their first month of operation last year. Since then, they've added multiple hundreds of childcare centers to their platform.
Soon, they'll allow many grade schools to monitor their teacher-to-student ratios to keep up on state regulations. Metrics are going to become an important part of the app as well. Part of this includes allowing parents to do real-time monitoring of what their children do in daycare.
Keep reading us at Founder Institute as we profile our greatest Graduates who keep changing the world with their business ideas.
Watch Kangarootime pitch their company at the 43North Startup Competition:
