Grateful for our 2022 at Kinderpedia. Looking forward with optimism and determination

365 days of meaningful projects, working with amazing people, embarking on exciting adventures and so many more reasons for gratitude to our team, our partners, our mentors, our overall community 

The end of the year is a time for reflection and evaluation. We, at Kinderpedia, took this opportunity to think about how much we have achieved and how far we still have to go. As we are wrapping up 2022 and making resolutions and plans for the year to come. We can’t help but feel grateful and energized by the accomplishments, challenges and lessons learned over the past 12 months.

This year’s challenges led us to new perspectives and creative solutions. The Kinderpedia community has found new sources of inspiration and constant support. And our new partnerships help us paint an ambitious vision for the future.

The Kinderpedia community map expanded to more than 25 countries in 2022

We’re excited to see more and more schools choose our management and communication platform and become members of our global community. We are grateful to each of our users and proud to support them in their day-to-day classroom activities and communication with students and parents. Their input and feedback are the motors behind our new innovative features and their satisfaction gives us the energy to grow and accomplish our mission.

We are also enthusiastic about the amazing partnership we initiated and strengthened this year. World-class education providers and proven innovators such as Maple Bear Global School or Brave Generation Academy chose to expand their collaboration with Kinderpedia and trusted us to be their unique digital interface for school management, classroom interaction, academic progress tracking, parent engagement and school financial management.  

2022’s valuable partnerships bring new opportunities for expansion

Kinderpedia’s collaboration with Maple Bear started in 2020 when Maple Bear CEE and later Maple Bear Gulf Schools chose our platform as their unique operating system for the Maple Bear schools in the region. This year, Kinderpedia joined hands with Maple Bear Global Schools – thus set on a path to become, the exclusive operating system for Maple Bear schools worldwide, over the upcoming year. We are proud to provide an innovative digital tool capable of rendering support for all the operational, financial, communication and academic activities and needs of the largest global Canadian bilingual education franchise network. 

Brave Generation Academy is probably among the fastest-growing school networks in our community. Not only did they grow amazingly in Portugal this year, but they also expanded to Spain, Italy, Netherlands, USA, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Mozambique and counting! Supporting the growth in highly innovative and dynamic schools is one of our greatest and most rewarding goals and we are proud to have contributed to their success this year also.  

Another promising collaboration came to life in 2022: FAPOESTEJO – the largest federation of parent associations in Portugal - signed a partnership with Kinderpedia, thus providing preferential conditions for the 130,000 students and families in the West, Lezíria Tejo, and Médio Tejo, to use the platform to better engage in class, communicate and monitor progress. Together with FAPOESTEJO and the local municipality representatives, our Portuguese team has hosted their first conference in the city of Santarém, in the spectacular Convento do Sao Francisco. Three more events followed this year and the Kinderpedia community of teachers and parents keeps growing. 

Throughout the year, we’ve joined hands with exceptional partners to organise engaging and inspiring events for the education ecosystem. Meeting dedicated teachers and educators is always an opportunity to foster new and fruitful projects that place education and innovation under the spotlight.

Contributing to the transformation of education on four continents in 2022

The year that is coming to an end has taken us to many corners of the world. Our international journeys started off in London, where we exhibited at BETT, the education fair and conference that brought together over 800 leading edtech companies and more than 45,000 teachers, education leaders and specialists. 

We then headed to BETT Brazil, in Sao Paolo, where the Kinderpedia team connected with close to 1,000 relentless education innovators.

The next destination on our map has been Canada, where we presented Kinderpedia at the Collision Conference. With 35,000+ attendees, 140+ countries, 600+ speakers, 1,250+ start-ups, and 850+ investors, Collision is rightfully nicknamed "the Olympics of tech". It's where we got the chance to meet our friends from Maple Bear Global Schools and further strengthen our partnership. 

Our close collaboration with InnovX and BCR, together with our success at their 2021 startup accelerator cohort, brought us the opportunity to present Kinderpedia at Select USA, the largest foreign investment summit in Washington, United States of America. 

GESS Dubai welcomed us with the bustle and excitement of promising perspectives and amazing opportunities to further contribute to the transformation of education in the GCC and the wider MENA region. 

The European Parliament hosted us twice this year. We were honoured to participate alongside entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world in discussions and debates concerning education and the start-up ecosystem. 

The RO-UAE Tech & Energy Summit held in Abu Dhabi in November brought Kinderpedia to the attention of investors and potential partners in the Middle East. We talked about the excellent results of schools and kindergartens using Kinderpedia in the region and reaffirmed our commitment to growing our impact in this part of the world. 

Committed to improving Kinderpedia continuously, this year we released several new features and improvements

For children, achievements are often measured in grades, and national test results, when they are best reflected in acquisitions and skills for the future. Teachers in our community were looking for a better way to observe, measure and communicate children’s progress at any moment of the school year. 

We were happy to launch the newest module in the Kinderpedia app: school progress assessment. With our students, teachers and parents in mind, we build a versatile instrument that empowers teachers to measure the children’s progress, keep track of their development and more, share it with parents and thus bring them closer to their children’s education.

Building the team that transforms education with the help of technology

Kinderpedia is in a full expansion process and thus our team is constantly growing. New valuable and ambitious members are joining Kinderpedia every quarter, adding their fresh perspectives and skills to the mix and proudly committing to the mission of transforming education with the help of technology. 

When InnovX-BCR launched a job platform to support Ukrainians who are relocating to Romania, Kinderpedia was the first company to post a job opening. We were looking for a talented PHP developer, but we found so much more. Out of the 70 professionals who applied for the job, on jobs4ukr and LinkedIn, Artem’s drive, tech skills and adaptability have been the most compelling. We are lucky to have found him and grateful for the way he contributed to our mission so far. 

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐭, 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 has been the motto of this year’s team building at Kinderpedia. We were excited to meet our colleagues from different countries, but we did more than meet them: we spent four days together, full of laughter, hiking, dancing and fun and we discovered we have so many values in common. These days of fun, laughter, games and insights glued our team closer together and the memories created during this teambuilding will stick with us for years to come. 

 Our community is growing, and so is our impact 

Strengthening teachers’ digital competencies and bridging the learning gap children are faced with, after more than two years of pandemics, are two areas we are strongly committed to contributing to. 2022 gave us the opportunity to take further the projects and partnerships we had already initiated for this purpose, with Brio and Livresq, two dynamic, complementary edtech solutions, dedicated to standardized testing and educational content creation. Together, we carried four comprehensive digital formation programs for more than 2,000 teachers and held the third edition of our learning recovery program, AER School, thus providing remedial education for more than 5,000 primary and elementary school students. 

More than before, this year we came to realise that the challenges we overcame, the various circumstances we navigated, the mistakes we made and the learnings we gained may serve as valuable insights for entrepreneurs at the beginning ot their journey, when pivoting or at the time of scaling. So, we were happy to contribute to the startup community and support founders and social innovators. Our colleague, Evelina Necula,  co-founder and CMO of Kinderpedia, participated in the advisory board of the Startarium 4GOOD program by Impact Hub, acted as a mentor in the latest cohort of the Future Makers Incubator by Social Innovation Solutions and contributed to Bravva Angels’ first edition of the Invest Ready Programme. 

Schools and nurseries from different corners of the world opened their doors and shared their experience with Kinderpedia

Talking with our users and discovering how our platform helps teachers, parents and managers become more efficient is one of our favourite activities and definitely the strongest motivation booster. This year, we shared the success stories of some exceptional schools and the amazing people that give them life and meaning. We spoke to Martin Schultze and Sofia Borges from Brave Generation Academy, Saurabh Narain from Maple Bear Gulf Schools and Yann Bidan, from Maple Bear CEE. Elena Lotrean, together with the team of ERI School also welcomed us to tell the story of their 6-year experience with Kinderpedia and we gladly spoke with the inspiring teachers and school leaders at Waldorf Sofia, Heidi Brasov, Maria Clara Kindergarten and, last but not least, Elementary School of Curcani. So, you can imagine how excited we’ve been when Viforel Dorobanțu, won the award for Principal of the Year for Innovation award from the Values in Education Association, later this year. We felt truly honored and grateful for his and his team’s partnership and trust in transforming education. 

New recognitions of Kinderpedia’s impact and innovative character

During ZF’s Most Valuable Tech Start-up Conference, Kinderpedia has been awarded the prize for international expansion in edtech, a recognition we owe to our exceptional teams and to our visionary users, such as Maple Bear Global Schools Ltd., Brave Generation Academy and many more. 

In November 2022, Kinderpedia also became an Impact Star Laureate at the Deloitte Technology Fast50 Central Europe competition and was nominated among the Best Companies and Startups in the region, by BestStartups.eu. This is a wonderful recognition of Kinderpedia's innovative impact and we are honored to be part of such an inspirational community!

Committed to growing our impact and helping school and nursery communities thrive

We have built a support structure that allows us to grow internationally and become a reliable partner to schools from Europe, the Middle East and beyond. In the long run, our goal is to play an active role in the development of digital competencies of teachers and students alike, to contribute to the diminishing of functional illiteracy and school dropout in vulnerable school communities across the world and to provide schools with an easy tool and a comprehensive framework for the observation and assessment of school progress. We know that private education is at the forefront of innovation in the education ecosystem, which is why we promise to remain a reliable partner for private schools and childcare centres, as they grow their communities. 

As we look forward to 2023, we are committed to expanding our impact. We aim to strengthen our support to innovative and determined teachers and school leaders, to contribute to making education fun and relevant for bright students and to allow families to play an active role in children’s education.