Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Bahrain’s leading new ventures have returned from start-up school where they showcased their skills at the fifth MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab’s Silicon Valley programme.
Eight Bahraini start-ups headed to California, US, where they exhibited their solutions to an international audience of investors, entrepreneurs and accelerators during Techcrunch Disrupt San Francisco.
Among the start-ups were SINC, whose story was shared in GulfWeekly recently, as well as Springring, a cloud-based schoolwide communications management platform connecting school admins, teachers, parents and students, along with other EdTech Systems.
Springring’s Bahraini cofounder Mohammed Ashoor grew up in Montreal before moving back to the Middle-East to complete his undergraduate degree in computer engineering from the University of Bahrain. When he graduated and went into Investment Banking at Standard Chartered and Crédit Agricole, he probably would never have guessed he would be developing an app for parents and schools to stay connected.
However, when Agricole moved to Dubai in 2012, instead of relocating his family, he decided to take the plunge and start his own digital agency, VII Tech Solutions. His agency and burgeoning fatherhood brought him into the educational orbit.
Mohammed reminisced: “We were developing solutions for educational organisations who were all trying to solve the communication problem, but I didn’t realise how big the problem is until my children started school. All of a sudden, I had to monitor multiple channels just to know about my children’s activities.
“In this day and age, where both parents are often working, the problem gets even worse. My wife gets the emails from school since she is the primary contact and if forwarding every email slips her mind, I end up in the dark about pickup and drop-off times as well as field trips and special events. Adding the school calendar to my personal calendar just mixes everything up.
“And then there are separated families, for whom I can’t even imagine how difficult it can be to coordinate schedules to drop children, pick them up and take them to activities and so on. In either case, the children are the ones who end up being affected the most.
“So there was no centralised way of staying connected. Lots of teachers were using ClassDojo since it was free, but there, the school had no way of staying connected with parents, and many teachers would have to duplicate or triplicate their effort to enrol parents in the class and then keep them up-to-date. So there was a market gap and we decided to address the need.”
Mohammed, along with his childhood friend and creative director, Jawad Sadiq, started working on a solution. First, it was just supposed to be a messaging application, but it quickly grew to include a private social media component, based on feedback from teachers, and the team is now working to integrate existing EdTech Systems like classroom and grade management into the application. Unlike existing solutions, they focused on making a system that could be implemented at the school level and would flow downwards, instead of having each teacher sign up and enrol students.
This would make things like parent enrolment and external integrations much easier, even if it increases the upfront labour investment.
The feature that Mohammed is most excited about is integrating authorisations and micropayments into the system. He added: “I am often so frustrated by the little expense. Half dinar for this activity, 1BD for that trip, sign this form, drop it off in this box on this date. Why? Instead, we want to bring in biometric authorisation so you get a notification about an upcoming trip. Simply authorise with your fingerprint like you do with your mobile banking and if there is an associated payment, you authorise that as well. And done! No teacher has to go through the list seeing who has got their form and payment and who hasn’t. The app does everything including processing the payment, making everything easier.”
While this sounds like Star Trek meets the Jetsons, Mohammed and Jawad know that they are only as good as their testing grounds. Three nurseries and a popular secondary school have signed on and hype around the product is already building.
The company, which has been self-funded until it became part of Flat6Labs Bahrain’s Tamkeen-mandated third cycle of investments and now the team is looking to bring in additional investment as it continues to perfect its product till it is ready for market.
Mohammed said: “We want to get as much feedback so once we bring on paying clients, it just works.”
To find out more about Springring, visit https://myspringring.com/
