At Prime, we’re constantly looking for founders and companies building category-defining products in underserved markets. Our recent $2.5M investment in Illumine, a vertical SaaS platform for preschools and childcare centers, is a bet on a massive market that has seen limited digital disruption, and on a team with the product obsession, grit, and execution capability to win.
A Massive, Underserved Market
The global spend on early childcare that includes pre-schools and day-care centres is a staggering $600 billion. Yet the industry remains largely analog. Walk into a childcare centre and chances are you’ll see teachers juggling physical notebooks for attendance, manually tracking children's activities, and spending precious hours on administrative tasks that pull them away from their core job of caring for and educating children.
The statistics speak for themselves:
- 60% of US centers still use pen and paper for attendance
- 50% communicate with parents via physical notes
- 88% report staffing shortages, partly due to administrative burden
For centers that have adopted tech, the experience is often poor. They either have to deal with legacy platforms with outdated UI, on-prem software, no mobile-first design, or fragmented point solutions requiring 3-4 separate tools for billing, communication, scheduling, and assessment.
As a result centers either stick with manual processes or cobble together multiple systems that don't talk to each other resulting in data silos, higher costs, and major workflow gaps leading to extra workload on teacher and staff and missed revenue opportunities for owners.
On the other hand, today's parents, who are digital natives accustomed to real-time updates and seamless mobile experiences, are frustrated by the lack of transparency and communication from their child's care provider.
Illumine, a 10x Better Offering
Enter Illumine, a truly comprehensive, AI-powered platform designed for modern childcare operations and new age digital users.
What makes it 10x better:
- Comprehensive coverage from lead management and enrollments to daily operations, parent communication, educational assessments and billing, an all in one platform.
- AI-first offering with automated lesson planning, intelligent insights, reporting and much more.
- Easy to use configurable system that adapts to each centre’s workflows, supports local payment integrations and regional compliance requirements
- Modern, mobile-first design that teachers and parents actually want to use.
- Enterprise-grade reliability with consumer-app simplicity that can be used easily by multi-centre schools.
What impressed us beyond the market was an exceptional team. The founding trio of Navneet, Saurabh and Purva bring in complimentary skill sets across business, tech and product. They’ve worked together before and bring high trust, and customer obsession.
They have scaled frugally to over 15 countries and the results speak for themselves.
- 90% increase in admissions through better lead management.
- 50% boost in parent satisfaction with real-time communication.
- 1.7x faster payment collection.
- 96% improvement in staff retention
Preschools are foundational to our society but the way they’re run hasn’t changed in decades. Illumine is building the digital operating system for this sector, with a full-stack solution that streamlines operations, empowers educators, and delights parents.
We’re thrilled to back Navneet, Sourabh, and Purva on their mission to reimagine early childhood education for the digital age.
