As a parent, there may have innumerable times when you have gnashed your teeth at the lack of any communication from your child’s school. There is this feeling of anxiety when the school bus that should drop off your child at the gate is a few minutes late.
It is exactly for these reasons that Prasanna Kaliamoorthy and Anurag Gopinath, both colleagues at American semiconductor company Broadcom, teamed up to start Tangsys Technologies Pvt Ltd, which offers its product under the brand SkoolBeep, to help schools communicate better with parents.
According to Prasanna, an electronics and instrumentation engineering graduate from NIT Rourkela, communication was the core premise on which they started the venture. The first service they launched was sending out messages, sharing photographs and activities, attendance record and sharing home work.
Parent communication
“We wanted to build a bouquet of products and services around the communication platform,” says Prasanna, 41, Co-founder and COO of the company. When they launched SkoolBeep, he says, schools had not seen any such product that would help them reach out to parents easily and communicate with them in a better manner.
“That was where we felt there was a gap. We said schools will also increasingly adopt technology and parent communication has to be one of the key aspects,” he adds.
In 2015, when they started the company, smartphones had become ubiquitous, even in smaller towns and cities, and women were adept at using the phones to communicate and share messages.
The mothers were the ones more deeply involved with the child’s education. SkoolBeep targeted them, especially parents in tier-2 and tier-3 towns. The product was built with their needs in mind and aimed at private schools that charged fees of ₹15,000 or more a year.
They started off, says Prasanna, targeting pre-schools, because if one pre-school in a locality had this product, others in the vicinity will be under pressure to get the product. Their first customer was a Montessori school in Bengaluru.
Since then, the product has spread more by word of mouth than anything else. A GPS tracking tool to keep track of the school bus followed.
Since then, SkoolBeep has added a number of features, including fee management and live classes, both of which are helping in the time of Covid-19 pandemic, where almost all activities have been shut down.
Prasanna says they are quite clear that they want to play in the communication software space, which is an interface with the parents alone. All other features will be built around this. SkoolBeep has even tied up with fintech players to offer parents the option of availing of an educational loan.
On the cloud
The software is hosted on the cloud and the app is available for download in both Android and Apple versions. They get their income from the schools.
SkoolBeep, according to him, has around 350 paying schools, 60 of them in metros and the rest in smaller towns, in the K12 segment in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.
The company would like to cover all the districts in these three States before venturing out, as the three States alone have nearly 3,000 CBSE schools.