Technology plays a fundamental role in today’s K-12 education environment. Not only is it responsible for improving learning outcomes for students, but it is also critical to creating efficiencies and streamlining classroom workflows for teachers and administrators who are time and resource-constrained.
Yet in spite of all the innovation, the distribution and implementation of new technology within schools remains extremely difficult.
Why is this? Every school has a database called a Student Information System or “SIS” — a single source of truth for student, teacher and classroom data. While SIS are valuable repositories, they have limited functionality.
As such, teachers and administrators rely on a vast array of 3rd party applications to manage day-to-day and teaching activities (e.g. attendance tracking, student health records, and subject-specific apps for curriculum delivery). And ideally, these 3rd party apps should integrate with each SIS, but they don’t because integrations are complex, expensive and non-core for edtech developers.
This web of solutions, and the lack of interoperability between each software provider results in:
This is one of the biggest challenges in the $130B global edtech industry and a rampant technology obstacle for schools around the world.
Which is why we’re thrilled to announce our latest investment in UK-based edtech company Wonde.
Founded by seasoned edtech veterans Peter Dabrowa, Jon Coleman and Philip Clifton, Wonde is reshaping the distribution, implementation and security of edtech in classrooms globally. Wonde sits at the centre of the app developer and school ecosystem, and through its unique API, removes interoperability roadblocks by automating data integration between 3rd party apps and SIS. In doing so, it collapses the time and cost of software integrations for developers, accelerating the distribution of their technology into schools.
For staff and students, Wonde enables access to new apps faster and easier than ever before — improving teaching outcomes for millions of students.
We have been blown away by Wonde’s growth since its 2015 launch, and its emergence as a leader in the global edtech sector.
The phenomenal adoption of the Wonde API among schools and app developers has allowed Wonde to deploy new products directly to schools. For example, Wonde has a data management platform that coupled with the API provides school IT administrators with complete visibility and control over data shared with external apps. The Wonde platform is crucial in light of legislation like GDPR, which puts personal data privacy and security at the forefront. Data security has long been a top priority for businesses, but in education, it is often an afterthought. We believe Wonde is in a prime position to become the trusted service to fulfil this important obligation for schools.
The universal challenge in edtech is to securely manage and transfer student and school data amongst 3rd party software applications.
Wonde is now a Google Premier Education Partner and one of the fastest-growing edtech companies in Europe. Its platform is adopted in 14,000+ schools in the UK and AU/NZ, and is managing secure data and app logins for 24+ million students and teachers. These numbers are astounding when considering the highly fragmented nature of the education market. With Peter, Jon and Philip at the helm, we have great confidence in their ability to continue scaling this company internationally given their unrivalled depth of experience and insight into this market.
At Tempus, we have always been excited about companies with missions bigger than just solving for a utility. Wonde is no different. The team has big ambitions to deliver positive and lasting change to the world of education by fuelling the distribution of technology in classrooms, and dramatically improving access to the data and insights for better learning outcomes. It’s an exciting journey ahead — because for Wonde, the magic has just begun.
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