KinderPass: Baby Development App To Groom Babies & Toddlers With Brain Building Games

Avantika Bhardwaj

Jun 29, 2021 — 7 min read

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Amid this Lockdown, several startups that have mushroomed during this time, not many have paid attention to the little ones - pre-schoolers and kindergarten kids. Keeping them engaged during this time is a mammoth task, especially for parents who work from home. That’s exactly where KinderPass steps in.

Founded by two young mothers - Sumedha Khoche and Shireen Sultana - KinderPass offers activities for children based on their age and development needs, reassuring parents that their kids’ early learning needs are being fulfilled.

KinderPass- Company Highlights

Company Name	KinderPass
Headquarters	Singapore
Founders	Sumedha Khoche and Shireen Sultana
Founded	May 2018
Sector	Ed-Tech
Website	mykinderpass.com

KinderPass- About and How It Works
KinderPass- Founders
How was KinderPass Started
KinderPass- Name, Logo and Tagline
KinderPass- Vision & Mission
KinderPass- Target Market Size
KinderPass- Products and Services
KinderPass- Startup Launch
KinderPass- Customers/ Clients
KinderPass- Challenges
KinderPass- Recognitions and Achievements
KinderPass- Future Plans

KinderPass- About and How It Works

KinderPass, an award-winning early learning app, that brings exciting brain building classes in Early Reading, Maths, Fitness, Art and more. It offers well-curated content for parents that are tailored for their children. According to the founders, the platform brings together principles aligned with EYFS, Montessori and Waldorf principles of play based learning and a repertoire of scientific research on early development.

It's a known fact that children learn best through play, interactions with adults, and by activities that involve all senses. Passive viewing of videos is detrimental to a child’s developing brain - over-stimulation of some areas while other areas (such as fine motor skills, language or social-emotional skills) suffer.

KinderPass offers activities for children based on their age and development needs, reassuring parents that their kids’ early learning needs are being fulfilled. The KinderPass app contains 1,200+ bite sized activities for ages 0-4, screen-free exercises, and activities that parents can do with their children in the comfort of their own homes, without needing any expensive material. These activities have been carefully designed to fit a busy parent’s schedule. Based on each day’s feedback, the activities for are changed for the next day.

KinderPass- Founders

KinderPass is founded by Sumedha Khoche and Shireen Sultana.

Sumedha was born and raised in Delhi and did her MBA from IIM-Indore. She went on to lead sales, insights, and consumer marketing at PepsiCo, and later at P&G, Singapore. She discovered her true passion for teaching and early childhood education once her children were born.

Shireen was born and raised in Visakhapatnam and also went to IIM-Indore for her MBA, and joined Madura Coats out of campus. She followed it up with stints in Mars India, Aircel, and ISB. “Entrepreneurship happened when I helped my husband setup White Cloud Brands to help SMBs solve business problems through marketing. Parenting brought on a curiosity-led understanding of various teaching principles (Montessori, Waldorf, PlayWay, etc.) and early childhood development and learning, which helps contribute to KinderPass today,” she says.

“Our own experience of being working parents - the first few years are the most crucial for child development, and this is precisely the time when parents are time-starved with so many different demands on their time - work, childcare, elderly care, and more. What we also observed all around us was the growing incidence of the phone becoming a teacher and babysitter for children - babies were getting a phone before even their first tooth,” says Sumedha.

Sumedha and Shireen were batchmates and roommates at IIM-Indore, and have known each other for 19 years now.

How was KinderPass Started

They are highly passionate about making a difference in the early years and the lack of an authentic, reliable brand that helped parents make the most of this age was what got us going. The company felt that a lot of the critical aspects of brain science in the early years was locked away in research papers. Most working parents did not have the time or wherewithal to access that information but definitely wanted to make that difference in their child’s development and growth.

KinderPass tested this hypothesis with 150 parents back in late 2018 by running a pilot program wherein they’d receive activities every day for over 2 weeks. Over 75% of parents in this test group came back saying they would be excited to have a product that would help them receive similar information through their children’s growing years and that’s how KinderPass was born.

Research and validation have been part of their growing process over the last 18 months. KinderPass tested their online sessions through various formats and learning approaches, to arrive at the current multi-sensory, highly interactive format that has seen excellent engagement with children between the ages of 3 and 7. Children learn through music, movement, personal attention of a well-trained, qualified teacher and an interactive, play-based learning environment.

KinderPass- Name, Logo and Tagline

KinderPass Logo

KinderPass- Vision & Mission

At KinderPass, their mission is to enable parents to give their little ones the best start in life. The company strives to do this by making excellent early learning convenient, affordable and interactive for each parent and child.

KinderPass- Target Market Size

Globally, the Enrichment activities market is estimated to be 270 billion by 2025. Singapore alone accounts for about 1 Billion enrichment spends per year.

KinderPass- Products and Services

KinderPass is available as a mobile app on iOS and Android and a webapp too. Parents can download the app for free and browse through personalized activities for their children. From birth to three years of age, parents are encouraged to use the app daily to perform recommended activities with their children that impact four fundamental pillars of development - cognitive, physical, personal-social and linguistic.

Parents take periodic milestone assessments, track their child’s growth and development and also record their child’s skill level on the activity. Landmark events (almost everyday is one!) can be captured and shared through the ‘Memories’ feature, using readymade templates from ‘My First Day Home’ until ‘My First Day at School’ and everything in between.

From the age of 3, parents rope in the help of its qualified and trained teachers and facilitators to help children build further on the critical pillars through our online classes. Their classes are uniquely structured to provide children with learning that is fun, multi-sensory and interactive.

KinderPass was started in Singapore as a marketplace for all things kids’, in 2018. They quickly realized that scalability, quality control and ease of access were the challenges with this model and, pivoted to the at-home-learning app that KinderPass is today.

KinderPass- Startup Launch

KinderPass’ first 150 users came through the pilot program in India and Singapore. Parents would get activities on email and WhatsApp and their feedback is what made them kickstart the app.

KinderPass- Customers/ Clients

Today KinderPass has over 45000 users who come from over 50 countries and 5000 cities across the world. What is a matter of pride for the startup is more than 70% of these users have been acquired organically and through partnerships!

KinderPass- Challenges

Until lockdown in April, they were reliant on subscriptions and products (KinderPass’ own brand of developmental toys) for monetization. The company had a great lineup of products in the works too but all that came to a standstill. By late May/early June it became obvious that things weren’t going to go back to normal and that’s when they added online classes to our portfolio. As has been their approach, they tested these sessions and their approach through small batches, tweaking different variables with each batch (duration of session, batch size, teaching aids, curriculum, etc.) before arriving at what has become their signature style today.

KinderPass- Recognitions and Achievements

The Finder Singapore’s Most Innovative Award for Business Transformation, 2020
Regional Winners, Singapore for the SoGal Global Pitch competition, largest global startup pitch opportunity for women and diverse entrepreneurs worldwide hosted by SoGal Foundation
Sumedha Khoche, Founder and CEO, was recognized by the Women Innovation and entrepreneurship Foundation (WIEF) at National Summit on Women and Education Empowerment 3.0, for her contribution to early education.
KinderPass was selected to be part of the first cohort of Encubay’s India Accelerator Program.

KinderPass- Future Plans

Their aim is to reach a base of 100K users within the next 6 months while staying true to their approach of making excellent early learning accessible and affordable to children across the globe, with specific focus on India.

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