The days of rifling through the bottom of your kid’s backpack to find important class announcements are over. ClassTag is the digital communication platform that simplifies communication between educators and parents. Accessible through text or email, the platform can easily inform parents about a myriad of updates, ranging from school-wide initiatives down to messages related to individual students. Teachers can organize and customize outreach to include photo and video sharing, providing supply lists, newsletters, and interactive class calendars. With the underlying objective to improve students learning experience, parents are able to increase their involvement through in-app actions like parent-teacher conferences, volunteer opportunities, or donating supplies. ClassTag features sponsors like Under Armour and Clorox that post relevant ad content or education challenges and a portion of this revenue is donated to classrooms for much-needed supplies.
AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Vlada Lotkina to learn more bout how ClassTag is shaping parent-teacher communication across the US, which is critical with remote learning on the rise as a result of COVID. Currently, there are 24K active schools on the platform, 2 million engaged parents, and $3M dollars has been raised in rewards for teachers for supplies. Since being founded in 2015, ClassTag has raised a total of $11.6M across seven rounds and has a team of over 20 employees.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Seed funding. Investors include AlleyCorp, Contour Ventures, Founder Collective, John Martinson, Newark Venture Partners, Smart Hub, and TMT Investments.
Tell us about the product or service that ClassTag offers.
ClassTag is a communication platform for schools, created to fuel and inspire parent involvement. Engineered to provide the simplest and easiest way to communicate, ClassTag provides school leaders, parents, and teachers a streamlined communication channel, customizable to individual parent and teacher needs with automated translation in 60+ languages and multi-channel reach via SMS, email, apps or web.
ClassTag also effectively supports remote learning in early education and elementary, engaging parents in the educational process with scheduling, classroom management, communication, and learning tools.
What inspired the start of ClassTag?
I met my cofounder Jason in a preschool our kids were attending in New York. We wanted to create an easier method for parents and teachers to communicate with each other.
How is ClassTag different?
ClassTag is one simple platform that helps teachers reach every parent in their preferred channel and language, save time with smart automations, and earn much-needed supplies for their class.
What market does ClassTag target and how big is it?
ClassTag is at the intersection of several multi-billion-dollar markets, focused on monetizing parents purchasing and edtech for schools. Specifically, we are focused on advertising and brand dollars targeting parents with school-aged children and e-commerce for supplies and classrooms.
What’s your business model?
ClassTag currently makes money from brand partnerships and e-commerce.
On the brand side, we handpick sponsors who are education and family-friendly, who pay us to be featured in our parent-teacher platform, and we donate a portion of proceeds to the classrooms for supplies. In this way, brands are becoming sponsors vs advertisers on the platform. A great recent example would be Church & Dwight that co-branded a set of weekly challenges with ClassTag for families to do together during COVID-19.
On the e-commerce front, we have introduced supply lists for back to school as an extension of our core functionality making it easy for teachers to create lists and for parents to buy all that is needed with one click. The program has been very well received by both teachers and parents.
How has COVID-19 impacted your business?
COVID-19 school closings accelerated the adoption of technology in schools by 2-3 years and thus massively expanded our market overnight.
With 95%+ schools closed across the country, ClassTag has become the trusted resource in navigating the uncharted waters of home education and a critical connection point for over two million parents and teachers.
From being a platform capturing daily moments and weekly activities, ClassTag emerged as an all-day engagement platform that is used to manage live instruction, assignments, videos, read-alouds, and interactive games on top of its parent communications.
We provide critical equity and access for all families with SMS and automated translation. All of this resulted in a 2-5x increase in all core metrics in days! The love and support from our community show the immense contribution ClassTag is making to support education and students.
From being a platform capturing daily moments and weekly activities, ClassTag emerged as an all-day engagement platform that is used to manage live instruction, assignments, videos, read-alouds, and interactive games on top of its parent communications.
We provide critical equity and access for all families with SMS and automated translation. All of this resulted in a 2-5x increase in all core metrics in days! The love and support from our community show the immense contribution ClassTag is making to support education and students.
What was the funding process like?
We have been lucky to have some amazing investors and supporters from our prior round, so we knew that once we have a couple of leads in place, the round would come together quickly. And that is exactly what happened. Our major investors – Founder Collective and Newark Venture Partners – from the initial 2018 Seed round joined this round, and we welcomed a number of prominent investors across NY and CA mainly, including legendary Kevin Ryan (ad and e-commerce guru) and John Martinson (edtech veteran), and a number of other great funds.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Time. Raising capital takes time away from business and you need to commit to it and ensure the rest of the team can support the growth while you are focused elsewhere.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Numbers don’t lie. We have an amazing net promoter score (measure of product love), engagement, retention, and growth rate. When investors see it, they can’t help it!
I also run a good system for investor updates, so this serves as my main fundraising mechanism.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We have been on a phenomenal trajectory and will continue to hit our user growth milestones and integrate new revenue streams with eCommerce and subscriptions.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
I have three pieces of advice:
- Maximize your revenue – it is the best way to fund your business. Period.
- Minimize your costs – now is a great time to explore remote and global workforce, especially if you are constrained in terms of budgets.
- Tell your story and tell it again – keep your potential investors, employees, contractors, community, updated on your progress and build a sense of togetherness
Tell your story and tell it again – keep your potential investors, employees, contractors, community, updated on your progress and build a sense of togetherness
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
ClassTag is on a mission to become the beating heart of every classroom, connecting parents to their kids’ education, activities, and community. We are doubling down on this mission with the fresh funding to expand and deepen our support for parent engagement and community at a school and district level as well as in eCommerce.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
At this point, after lockdown, I am not picky!
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