What's up party people? My name is Sunonny Ray. This is the Sunny Ray Show. My next guest or my first guest for the day, his name is Navni Ras Stoi. He's bringing AI into early childhood education, helping child care teams save time, create better learning experiences. So with that said, I'm going to bring Nevina in. How's it going, bud? Thanks a lot, Sunonny. It's all going well. Thanks a lot for having me.
Yeah, it's a delight to have you here. So, I'd like to begin just by diving right into the deep end. what is Illumine? What are you building? What's the problem you're solving? I was touched by your story as well. So, let's maybe begin there.
Got it. So, we are working in a very interesting space for early education preschools and the childare teams across the world. the idea is to bring all three stakeholders like which is teachers, parents and the directors or the owners on a single platform not just to digitize their work is also make sure their life is easier and that's where AI is helping bringing all them on a single platform is helping a lot there removing a lot of work of just entering the data in the system is going away and is giving them end output there like I can give an example Right? For example, teachers write lot of observations and daily notes that send it to goes to the parents. So they know what they little one is has been learning in the center today and imagine they're handling 20 kids and spending 10 minutes writing out those observation on each kids. It's all easily two hours time spent on that and they still have to take care of the kids and observe them, plan the lessons for them, plan the activities around them. So it's a big overhead around that. So what we are building is making sure that this two hours gets translated into 10 minutes and they get two hours back to go back to the teacher in the classroom and work with the kids.
So I got three little ones that are about to wake up. You know, they're going to be heading off to school. So this is timely and interesting. But you know, let's maybe slow down a little bit. I'm super interested in I guess Nevi before illumin you led engineering teams on data and analytics products. I guess what carried over into early education and what did not.
Yeah, that that's a very interesting question. I think and I relate to a lot of parents also unless until you got into that stage of the life when you have young kids and then you start looking for a preschool or a childare centers. You don't realize like how important those early years are and what it takes to run a childare center. For me as a parent like I used to work as engineering manager earlier worked on machine learning data science bigger problems there but when my son started going to the child care center back in India and there were some milestones that got missed to the communication and then realized which was very important to me as a parent and I reached out there and realized this was just one of the effects of what's going on in their life what the tools available to the teachers and the childare staff there. So one was the communication of course that was lagging around where people were missing around the milestones important information out there but there were other issues around the systems out there and then realize how important these early years are like for the community for the parents everything so that led me to say okay we can fix it I come from engineering background why not build a better solution people were using solution design for K12 which generally don't work in childare and preschool because we're talking about very young kids they are not communicating that what I've done today in the school or what was my day looks like. So you need to understand as a parent and if you know like one of the examples that happened with me like when I know what he did in the circle time today and I started singing the same song that they've done in the circle time I had a really meaningful time at the home instead of asking what have you done given today. So that led me starting this.
There something about missing his like first step or something like that or am I confusing?
So first time he started walking at daycare. I wasn't aware. So one day he started walking in the living room and as a first time we were very excited to go and tell the story back.
To everyone. We put it on social media. Next day when he was going to the center we informed them and they said he started two weeks back and I said I think you didn't inform us anything on that we might have missed and I said okay that's like a big thing for us like as a parent. So.
Yeah so I guess and so since that I was just curious I remembered that story I think told me about it. So what's the or you told me about it what's the I guess like is that problem solved now? So if somebody's children now in one of those classes so I have two boys one.
Nine years and the company's eight years old and the younger one is five years he goes to a center where I get to know all the updates from there like first time he started doing hoopla hoop or any coloring activities all of that those I'm aware of and then they use Illuman and I'm getting that communication so for me that problem is solved the society that I live when I work lot of time parents come to me saying that can you add this feature also on the product. I really love illumine. I get to know this. So that impact I'm seeing around as well as now seeing global stage also like whether you look at the US market or the UAE market where we have strong customer presence now.
So early education software is not an obvious place for an engineer to land, right? Like I guess what made the problem, you know, worth like a decade of your life? Like obviously our children are important to us, but I'm sure a lot of parents probably experience similar things. they don't decide to build an entire company around it. But do you remember that was it like a moment or like a process that brought you there?
So when we thought we like this was the problem. I called the CEO of this big chain back in India. They were running around 70 cent saying that I'm not happy as a parent. She said I'm not happy either with the system that we have. I said I can show it to you something. And this and next weekend like that weekend we were working and I think next Tuesday we went to show them the system and they said this is exactly what we want and we thought like oh my god we got it like let's build it and sell it like from there. But then next 6 months we were spending time in the rooms with the staff we were going around there all the teams like whether it's a inquiries admission the one who is doing marketing who's doing the billing realize it's a much complex problem than what we just looked at the teacher side of it. It's a operation operational like how do you solve that complexity of operation at the scale is a very different problem out there and when you decentralize and come at the center level then the problem comes at the user level like which is teachers and parent it got us excited and we also started seeing the impact like my if you look at it most of the people or women able to go back to work because they have a support system of childare like they can go back and they can work and come back like it's otherwise it's one of the parents has to sit back and make sure that's going on and these ears are also a very important when I started going more and deeper and we were looking for a center for my son I realized 90% of the brain is developed in initial five years and if they don't get the best quality education at that time you are making a lifelong impact right in that sense so that kind stuck with me saying that this is very meaningful. I want to solve this. I want to make sure for my kids everybody have a better future and of course I come from a technology background. So I said we will use the technology to solve it. I cannot go and teach but I can build a solution so that teachers can do their job better. Childare become easier to run. Like one of the thing that a lot of people don't understand when it comes to the K12 comparison in childare in K12 a kid goes in classroom let's say class one they stay up to 12 years like they're not changing patterns of enrollment like in childare they might be taking 3 days 2 days full day half day all those combinations are existing out there you need to have a ratios to maintain very aggressive ratios to maintain based on the state policies or the compliance that is there and then you also maintain can maintain the cost around it like the real estate cost and everything. There's a very complex business to run and stay profitable on the top of it. So as a software we can help on those part like you can go to code do the core job taking care of running those center while we can do the operation bit easier. I love that that's so powerful. So you said that the communication layer in early education is like fundamentally broken. I guess what exactly is broken kind of in the language of a like a center director.
I'll give you the example what was the communication state when I went in the classroom. The teachers were observing the kids. They were taking the notes putting on a sticky notes and putting on a wall and then somebody's taking them entering into the system when the kids are sleeping or during the nap time and then in that system then copy pasting to a system which they can send it on the communication platform to the plat parents like out there and these are very different solutions. So the point was people have digitized all the information whether it's enrollment whether it's a communication attendance and all of that but it's fragmented like in a sense you're using five solutions so it's adding more job for them like and for us the idea was like it's not solving the base problem that everybody committed as a software saving that time for them it has given them easy access to the information but it has not made it life easier in that sense and that's where we said that needs to be fixed like that broken piece needs to. So we map the whole journey like from a first touch point when a parent says I want to take admission in this school or I want to inquire it goes into the system they do the tool they do the registration daily attendance communication lesson planning assessment all of that thing sits in the one system so the point is like as a parent I have a single experience window teachers have a single experience window and one of the major problem also I've seen was these systems that were working in childare space were designed decade ago like the interface was more designed for kind of features were designed which is not relevant anymore like they're like people are used to voice messages they're very used to using phrasing phrase tool AI tools so kind of writing those things those none of those solutions were existing here and it adds up like in their work like lot of learning records that they have to do lot of observation that they have to do it takes a lot of time there so Those are the pieces that we feel. We give the interface very easily they can communicate with the parents. I speak a lot communities. I've still seen there is no mobile app. They're still sending emails to the parents.
And once a week what they have been doing instead of having a communication on a daily basis or at least some updates where they can easily access on the go.
Yeah. I know that really resonates. So I guess before there was like a case study to point at like how did the very first centers actually find illumin if I'm just thinking which market to pick if I put the US market first.
Yeah. So in the US market I think we started doing on ground visiting lot of centers to understand how it is different because when we have done it in lot of markets every market has 90% similarity how the childare or a preschool segment is running but there are specific nuances when we started going to the US market we started learning those nuances out there like it's very different than like the billing and the payment system is very different than rest of the world the drop-in system or pickup system is very different when parents come to pick up kids and dropping them in the center. We tried to study and when we started I started visiting as a parent and started asking question what my parent experience looks like and then they started showing me some of those systems and then as a parent I already had a lumine on my hand. So I showed it to them that this is how I get it back in India and that started opening oh my god this has so many things and this is so easy to use and that started discussing from there and that the client was not a small client that turned out to be one of our largest client called Dost Montary in US which is 100 locations. So we landed with one of the biggest client in the US as a first client.
Whoa. Wow. And all my kids went through Montasauri as well. So I'm a big fan of.
Big fan of their plan. Yeah. Everything about it. So that is super cool. Wow. Congrats on that. that's a massive one. So I guess you call Illumine the first vertical AI SAS platform for CH childare, right? So what does that claim actually mean inside the product?
That's very interesting and I I'll break it down maybe if someone who's trying to first understand what is the vertical AI means. so in general AI it's helping you with the language. it helping you with some automation out there but does it really understand the workflows for a particular segment like if you take an example for childare how the enrollment works in childare might be very different from K12 schools or it can be very different from getting a customer in any other industry so it goes through like a tour they're seeing the center there are a lot of requirement paperwork to understand like allergies requirement subsidies grants And a lot of things goes into like there's a very different workflow out there. When we say vertical AI, it understands the whole workflow. It has access to that data that what a role of a director in a childare center looks like. what a journey of a user from first inquiry to admission to a continuation looks like and that's where we started looking at it considering we were already built a system for the segment and tried to bring everything on a single platform so that we have and that was strategic advantage for us also but before even jumping on saying that vertical AI it was not like day one we said we will build a vertical AI out there we said we were internally debating what AI we can bring and it's a very sensitive space also because we're talking about kiss data their medical data a lot of very sensitive and very important data that you can't just simply put out and say okay let's train and start using it so there were a lot of first ground rules set for like how will we use AI and what where we can first bring it out and test so we started bringing first as a paraphasing tool where you're writing incident reports observation you can quickly give everything it will do the grammar check it will make sure the tonality is correct and all of those things and then also translating so that it can handle the multiculture there are no answers like for example we have customer in UAE somebody speaks Arabic similarly in Florida somebody speaks Spanish parent can see the incident report in Spanish out there so those are the things we started building and then the first adoption was very low like 13 14% out there and then we started digging deep why this is not getting used and that I think was like a eye openener for us so I went on customer calls try to understand they said it doesn't speak the school language or it doesn't speak the language that my school speaks to. We don't never use word I. We never use this kind of material or this kind of a language out there. It needs to be aligned to the pedagogy philosophy that they're following all of that and that started fine doing like and we give that control saying that as this school this is their unique traits like this is how they talk versus a school next door might be talking very differently like a Montiser school and a redu school they'll have very different context.
And we started building that local context country level context out there and of course the industrywide context is of early education there.
And that changed.
And now more than 90% of those observation and assessment reports are going through AI. Wow.
So that changed like in terms of adoption and the feature and that's where the nuances of vertical UI like we were able to understand what observation means in early education for 3 years, four years, five years, what is a Montary teacher using a material for?
Got it. was super interesting. So I guess a center director is already paying for four or five tools before you know turn up right. So like which one do they cancel to make room for mine?
So the first customer that I said like the one of the biggest customer they think three tools out there they were using one tool for parentcom and monessary records learning records out there. Then there is a second system for registration student information system where you have all the records out there and the billing system where you have all the billing is going on. Oh.
Okay.
All those were replaced with a single system. So all the forms that got digitized which they were using a form stack or something like that. All the billing and the SIS which was sitting in a single system that moved there. They build a custom tool in house for the capacity and the occupancy planning because as I said it's a very dynamic capacity problem like a very similar to the hotel like some days you have a full hotel some days you have and if you need to be profitable in hotel it needs to be full throughout like so they call it FTE or fulltime equivalence like that needs to be full and without a system that visibility is very low and when you're operating a large scale of let's say 50 or more location you can't literally go and look at each room you want to just compare each center in each program which is doing better. You want to adjust which programs you're offering in that location because maybe in that location more kids are available in a certain age group and the behavior for preschool and the child care is they will not go beyond 5 miles of a school because they're very young kid they want school closed by so if in the area that you are they're not very young children and you're opening a center you'll never be able to full. So they need to plan and look at that. So those are the system that we replace with a single system. So they see enrollment, they see the capacity, they also see the reenrollment which is very important like how many families you're retaining. They see collection on a single platform. They literally moved whole billing on one month on our platform which was one of the biggest challenge for us because in the day we were learning what US billing looks like in the night we were building it how to make sure that it works for the US customers.
I mean this is such an awesome project. What is it like 3,000 centers? Is that correct? And half a million children. Did I read that right? I guess like what's the number you actually watch each morning? And like why that one? And then after that, maybe just help me land the plane. We're at the end of the talk. I'd love to do a part two by the way further down the road. This is something I'm very passionate about as well. But yeah, but maybe help us understand that like what do you think? Which number are you kind of focused on?
So this is really interesting like what number I look at it. I don't look at number of schools. I don't look at number of students. The metric that I look at the retention metrics. So I keep telling the story I have my first employee. I have my first customer with me and that's the metric that I live up to saying that the purpose that I started this product was like I'm able to give the best solution in this industry because that was not there. Solutions were there the standard was low in terms of what could have been offered to childare and that retention is the only way to look at it like where people are not leaving and still happy with us and going with us because people will coming with the new solution. They are challenging and old startups there correct but we still able to retain those customer is one of the biggest thing that we look at it and it has been close to 100% retaining all the customers with us like unless until they shut down.
Or some cases happen like in a lot of centers shut down in middle some centers shut like shut down because of the capacity issues or what but otherwise customer has left us so that's a very important metric.
And same goes for the team I want that team to be part of it while we're building this company.
Good for you. Cool. Where do people learn more about it? And then yeah, I'll just I guess bring this one to an end.
Thank you, Sunonny. This is really nice to have.
Is it myillumine.com?
It's illumine.app. My.com also is coming. Yeah.
Okay. So, I can share that one if people want to learn more. For now, it points to the other one.
Yes.
Correct. Okay. Awesome. All right. Thank you all. I see we have a in the end. I think ilwine.app. Yeah,.
This also works. Okay, so I'll put that for now. We'll change it later. Okay, with that said, I'm going to bring this one to an end. Everyone listening live, thank you all for tuning in and never neat. Hang out for one minute.
