Our story
The challenge
In early 2009, my one-year-old daughter Nancy started full-time childcare. Within a few months I discovered the early childhood education community (both teachers and parents) were facing a challenge. Teachers record tons of information about children’s learning and growth, but there wasn’t an easy way to get that information to children’s parents. On the other hand, it’s also hard for parents to provide feedback to the teachers due to the time constraints of working full time and the busy lifestyles they lead.
Our solution
After a bit of research, I couldn’t find a simple solution that was specifically designed for this community. Therefore, a few months later, Educa was born. Educa is a custom-made solution for the problems both centres and parents are facing. By testing Educa on a few centres at first, we improved the product with the help of the generous and valuable feedback from centres and parents along the way.
Educa has now been released to other centres, so everyone can benefit from it's wide range of simple yet powerful features, which have been developed on the advice of those who use it.
Our goal is to provide the most easy-to-use and comprehensive solution to the problems faced by the early childhood education community.
Our team
Nathan Li
Founder and Managing Director
Nathan has been working in the IT industry for the past 9 years. His specialty is the design and implementation of enterprise level software solutions. Over his career, Nathan has not only developed solid technical skills, but also strong leadership skills. You can often find him leading a team of dedicated IT professionals delivering world-class solutions for customers.
Our Advisors
Amanda Santos
Advisor
Amanda Santos has 15+ years' experience working for a wide range of software and services organisations in the UK and New Zealand. She completed an MBA at Victoria University in Wellington in 2006 and was, until recently, the chief executive of a software company in the education sector. Amanda brings extensive sales and change management skills as well as a passion for strategy and mountain biking.
Sophie Hamilton
Advisor
Sophie Hamilton has 20 years education and management experience in both the early childhood and primary sector. She set up her first ECE centre in 1998 and her second in 2002. Sophie has worked as a private consultant over the past 3 years supporting schools and ECE centres as they strive to provide effective, quality education programmes and practices to the children of New Zealand, something she is highly passionate about!
Murray MacRae
Advisor
Murray is Business Strategist at Creative HQ. He has nearly 30 years of strategic and operational experience of business in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. He also has extensive advisory and marketing experience across 10 different industry groups. For the past several years, Murray has been heavily involved in helping young business to thrivein highly competitive markets.