“They provide the plumbing between hotels and online travel agencies.”
It was 2016 when my colleague Justin Lipman was describing the work he was doing with EVP portfolio company, SiteMinder. Admittedly new to the world of venture capital and startups, I sat confused for the afternoon at my corporate job trying to figure out what on earth a venture fund was doing getting involved in an old-school trades business.
Some quick googling that night revealed what we and each of SiteMinder's 35k customers all know today. The ‘plumbing’ refers to the integrations that SiteMinder provides between 230 hotel property management systems and 350 distribution partners like online travel agencies. These connections enable hotels to sell their hotel rooms everywhere their prospects are searching across a fragmented global marketplace via a single interface. Without SiteMinder, hotels face the impossible task of manually managing the admin of connecting into dozens of distribution partners.
Fast forward 5 years and Intellischool founder Dave Philp was describing to us a similar severe headache that principals, administrators, year coordinators and teachers are facing in the school environment.
As any venture investor, employee within the education sector or parent can attest to, the last decade has seen rapid adoption of software within the school environment. It is now common to see a school with a tech stack of many dozens of software solutions. The typical tech stack for a school might include a Student Information System, a Learning Management System (LMS), several digital curriculum providers, multiple learning and assessment tools and student wellbeing tools. US evidence points to the average educator interacting with 86 different edtech solutions in a given semester.
As the administration of student learning and wellbeing has spread across these fragmented and often legacy software tools, it has become a painful and expensive task for schools to synchronise information between these solutions and for school staff to draw insights for student benefit.
Dave founded Intellischool in 2018 alongside co-founder Josh Turci. Having spent several years working in data and IT for schools, the co-founders acutely understood what a mess this environment has become. They built the Intellischool product to integrate rich data across school software solutions to provide a range of school staff with a holistic view of student performance and wellbeing.
As investors we were particularly excited to learn how the product has become mission-critical for a range of different users in the school environment. For teachers, Intellischool allows them to see student performance and identify at-risk students to focus on. For the homeroom teacher, year level coordinators, and student mentors, automated and timely notifications have proved critical in facilitating check-ins with students, prompting out-of-cycle interventions and identifying which students may require priority attention. For principals and school administrators, having holistic data on student performance enables schools to apply for needs-based funding and grants to service underperforming students.
Collectively, users become reliant on Intellischool to operate their schools, with the business having never churned a customer. Our customer calls as part of diligence revealed a real sense of relief that Intellischool was in place to alleviate an increasingly daunting situation for customers.
In the short time since we first met Dave and Josh, the team rapidly scaled their businesses across schools at home and abroad, an impressive feat in the notoriously difficult to penetrate ed-tech market. Early traction in South East Asia confirmed the global nature of the problem outside of Australia’s ~10,000 potential school customers.
This commercial momentum, the depth of the product to be solved, and clear customer love for the product meant it was a business we couldn’t ignore. Getting to know Josh and Dave, we were quickly confronted with deep industry insiders primed to capture the opportunity, with their experience showing through in many nuanced but critical design choices in the product’s formation. Add in a bit of pattern recognition on the value of ‘plumbing’ in the B2B software environment and the stars had aligned to formally partner with Dave and Josh earlier this year.
As the role and volume of data increases exponentially in coming decades, we see Intellischool becoming core infrastructure for school systems. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Intellischool on their purpose-driven journey to improve student performance and wellbeing outcomes around the world.
“They provide the plumbing between hotels and online travel agencies.”
It was 2016 when my colleague Justin Lipman was describing the work he was doing with EVP portfolio company, SiteMinder. Admittedly new to the world of venture capital and startups, I sat confused for the afternoon at my corporate job trying to figure out what on earth a venture fund was doing getting involved in an old-school trades business.
Some quick googling that night revealed what we and each of SiteMinder's 35k customers all know today. The ‘plumbing’ refers to the integrations that SiteMinder provides between 230 hotel property management systems and 350 distribution partners like online travel agencies. These connections enable hotels to sell their hotel rooms everywhere their prospects are searching across a fragmented global marketplace via a single interface. Without SiteMinder, hotels face the impossible task of manually managing the admin of connecting into dozens of distribution partners.
Fast forward 5 years and Intellischool founder Dave Philp was describing to us a similar severe headache that principals, administrators, year coordinators and teachers are facing in the school environment.
As any venture investor, employee within the education sector or parent can attest to, the last decade has seen rapid adoption of software within the school environment. It is now common to see a school with a tech stack of many dozens of software solutions. The typical tech stack for a school might include a Student Information System, a Learning Management System (LMS), several digital curriculum providers, multiple learning and assessment tools and student wellbeing tools. US evidence points to the average educator interacting with 86 different edtech solutions in a given semester.
As the administration of student learning and wellbeing has spread across these fragmented and often legacy software tools, it has become a painful and expensive task for schools to synchronise information between these solutions and for school staff to draw insights for student benefit.
Dave founded Intellischool in 2018 alongside co-founder Josh Turci. Having spent several years working in data and IT for schools, the co-founders acutely understood what a mess this environment has become. They built the Intellischool product to integrate rich data across school software solutions to provide a range of school staff with a holistic view of student performance and wellbeing.
As investors we were particularly excited to learn how the product has become mission-critical for a range of different users in the school environment. For teachers, Intellischool allows them to see student performance and identify at-risk students to focus on. For the homeroom teacher, year level coordinators, and student mentors, automated and timely notifications have proved critical in facilitating check-ins with students, prompting out-of-cycle interventions and identifying which students may require priority attention. For principals and school administrators, having holistic data on student performance enables schools to apply for needs-based funding and grants to service underperforming students.
Collectively, users become reliant on Intellischool to operate their schools, with the business having never churned a customer. Our customer calls as part of diligence revealed a real sense of relief that Intellischool was in place to alleviate an increasingly daunting situation for customers.
In the short time since we first met Dave and Josh, the team rapidly scaled their businesses across schools at home and abroad, an impressive feat in the notoriously difficult to penetrate ed-tech market. Early traction in South East Asia confirmed the global nature of the problem outside of Australia’s ~10,000 potential school customers.
This commercial momentum, the depth of the product to be solved, and clear customer love for the product meant it was a business we couldn’t ignore. Getting to know Josh and Dave, we were quickly confronted with deep industry insiders primed to capture the opportunity, with their experience showing through in many nuanced but critical design choices in the product’s formation. Add in a bit of pattern recognition on the value of ‘plumbing’ in the B2B software environment and the stars had aligned to formally partner with Dave and Josh earlier this year.
As the role and volume of data increases exponentially in coming decades, we see Intellischool becoming core infrastructure for school systems. We’re incredibly excited to partner with Intellischool on their purpose-driven journey to improve student performance and wellbeing outcomes around the world.