NeeKids: Your Pedagogical Assistant

In Chile, 2 out of 5 children have special educational needs, more than 900 million in the world, but only 13% of the classrooms are prepared to work with these educational needs.

Children with special educational needs require neuropsychological and psychopedagogical tests, as well as educational programs adapted to their needs. This requires specialists, evaluations, and programs tailored to the child's needs. All this consumes high costs in human capital, materials, effort and time.

NeeKids is a tool that performs psycho-pedagogical and neuropsychological tests, using the data to select an educational program based on the child's special educational needs, all empowered by Artificial Intelligence.

In Latin America, the market is growing more than 18% a year, Neekids is a tool that provides educators and parents with fundamental cognitive, emotional and social support for their learning so that no child is left behind.

We are working with professional educators directly, and using goverment funds to enter in some special educational schools in Chile, that comply with a Educational Integration Program Requierements from the goverment (PIE in spanish).

Our solution is a platform that performs psycho-pedagogical and neuropsychological tests, using the data to select an educational program based on the child's special educational needs, all empowered by Artificial Intelligence.

Our main innovation is the neurodidactic profile, wich allows us to run classification and recommendation algorythms using the score from the tests, and levering on machine learning to recommed the best educational program for the childs educational needs.

The current solutions are mostly using papers tests, and analogal tabulation of results, and there are not enough trained professionals to serve a large population of childres with SEN, 1 out of every 4 children.

We pride ourselves on being a 100% digital device agnostic solution (We can run on any device with an internet browser). Seeking to comply with the 6 D’s of Tech Disruption an Exponential Technologies of Peter Diamandis.

Digital, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialization, Demonitization and Democratization.

We have used Steve's Bnal Customer Development Method to validate our hypothesis on the impact of our solution, and also de Delphi Method of expert research to forecast impact in the SEN's field.

We have 4 main activities, and It works in the following steps:

1) Select the Digital Test

Output: You save time, money and effort on developing, validating and selecting a library of tests to use, you can access the online, and save the paperwork.

2) Results are tabulated automatically

Output: You save time, money and effort on developing a score structure to obtain the data and variables than you need to asses the child's needs.

3) Based on the test result, an educational program adapted to your score is classified and recommended.

Output: You save time, money and effort on searching, selecting, using and testing different materials to see which will work best for the child's individual Needs.

4) Offer to download the Educational Program (printable digital content) to work with the child.

Output: You save time, money and effort on the adquisition of a particular program, browsing different channels and distributors; by using this user friendly, plug and play approach to get your educational materials.

5) After several tests, a pedagogical profile is obtained with their learning styles that recommend programs according to the child's progress.

Output: You get all the data organized, visualized and reported on your dashboard, where you can track progress and follow a clear path to improve the child's learning.

• 1. the current number of people you’re serving: 159

• 2. the number you’ll be serving in one year: 2000

• 3. the number you’ll be serving in five years: 8000

Our mission is that no child with special educational needs is left behind.

Especially if they are in a situation of illness, or in environments where there is little access to specialized programs and personnel because they are costly in time, effort and money.

Our final result with this automated processes, is to create a match between the neurodidactic profile and the ideal educational content to advance the student's learning abilities to the next level, improving their learning by 80%, as demonstrated by the Kumon method.

This will be specially helpfull in our region (latinamerica and the caribbean), where the latest research methods, techniques and technology usually take sometime to reach communities. We want to be a part of the new technologial solutions being used and loved by teachers all around the world.

#1 High Profile Tech talent

As mot tech startups, our main barrier is that high profile tech talent is in high demand and expensive. Thankfully our team has fullstacking capabilities, that allows to build our solution by ourselves, but it does require some bootstrapping.

Even though we have funds, our mail principle is to maintain our runway and budget in balance. This is under our control. We hope that with our early-evangelists in the very short term we will be able to affort top notch tech talents to help us create a even more scalable and robust product. With our traction we stimate that eventully we will be able to talk to with 142 investors and secure around 500.000 usd.

#2 Political Inestability of the Region

Outside of our control, are some strikes and political uncertaintiy that some times leads to the closure of shools, delaying of projects or suspension of activities. 

#1 High Profile Tech talent

With our traction we stimate that eventually we will be able to talk to with 142 investors and secure around 500.000 usd of seed funding. In the meantime, we plan to grow with organic sales, prizes such as SOLVE, and bootstrapping our way to scalability.

Thanfully, the founding team has the core abilities to create continuously building the product by their own. We have the knowledge, skills, talent, runway, and most importantly, we care enough.

#2 Political Inestability of the Region

This is outside our locus of control, but with the corona virus outbrake, we have been pivoting to go full online solution, accelerating our plan to eliminate human workers and presence as much as possible.

Currently we are working with the University of Concepción in Chile, with their accelerator UDD Ventures. We also have alliances with different distributors of educational technologies, that help us with customer adquisitions and introductions in schools.

At the moment we are doing our first Pilot programs in Chile, with a "wizard of oz" approach, where the platform is working but with our help as a team and working hand in hand with teachers and experts.

We have been very active in creating alliances with ther edtech communities specially from Argentina, because their expertise in psychopedagogics; Uruguay because there is a strong presence of edtech solutions coming from there, and specially in Spain, where we have alliances with IneveryCrea, Fundación Santillana, IE School, and most of our demands is coming from that country in Europe.

Once our pilot is strong enough, we will slowly introduce the solution in Chile school system with the help of our alliances. And from Chile we hope to expand to the neighborhood countries. We are originally from Venezuela, so introduction in Venezuela and Colombia will be the next step, once we have presence in the south cone.

Full Time:

• Carla A. Leal (CEO) Founder & Methodologist in child psychology.
• Simón P. Hernández (CTO) Full-Stack Developer and Data Scientist.

Part-time:

• Karina A. Hernández (CMO) Marketer and Publishing Expert.

Contractors:

• Carmen Pizarro (PedagogiaDigital) in Customer Adquisitions.

We have the secured the Rei Inamotos trio:

• The Hustler (Carla A. Leal - CEO)
• The Hacker (Simón P. Hernández -  CTO)
• The Hipster (Karina A. Hernández - CMO)

We all have experienced growing past startups, have the core skills, are commited to the mission, and we are though leaders in education, startups, creativity and brain fitness.

PedagogiaDigital in Chile, they help us introducing the solution in Schools.

Inevery Crea in Spain: They provide consultancy and help us to reach a community of more than 65.000 teachers.

Start-Up Chile:They help us with their pre-acceleration program TSF.

UDD Ventures in Chile: They help us with their acceleration support.

Our business model consists of income sources through Freemium subscriptions, Premium Packages and Pedagogical Campaigns.

Freemium Subscription

The business model is a Freemium subscription for the B2C customer segment: it includes parents and representatives, educators, educational psychologists, differential teachers, and pedagogical professionals. It consists of having basic features for free access, and availability to more complete tools in exchange for a monthly price.

Premium packages

The premium packages are for the B2C customer segment: which includes hospital classrooms, medical centers, home classrooms, special schools, and private and public schools. It consists of a bundle of premium accounts that professionals employed by the institution can use, benefiting from collective access with organizational performance statistics (Reportability is a very important feature for schools’ administrators).

This model has the advantage that we offer organizational training of the methodology and the use of the tool, for which a certification cost is charged.

Neurodidactic campaigns

For the B2G customer segment: such as governorates, town halls, municipalities, and public schools we have pedagogical interventions in the form of campaigns subsidized by the government agency.

This has the benefit of raising useful information for decision making in the creation of public policies that imply special educational needs. We have already started negotiations to start these campaigns in the municipality of Pichilemu.

We plan to follow a path that has already been proved usefull to other tech companies in the tech ecosystem, starting with:

1. Protoype
2. Incubation
3. Pre-Acceleration
4. Validation
5. MVP + Early Product Market Fit
6. Pilots, free demos
7. Early Sales, Early Adopters, Early Evangelist - Pivot Adjustments.
8. Neekids Version 1 (Thousend users, registrations)
9. Crowdfunding (optional)
10. Organic Growth and Growth Hacking tactics in demand, communitiy, prices, communications based on what we have learned.
11. Traction (Paid customers, Users, Visitors, etc) + More Definitive Product market Fit
12. Acceleration Abroad
13. Acceleration not-Equity free (Founding Team)
14. Scale Acceleration (Delaware C-Corp)
15. Sales, Sales, Sales, internazionalization.
16. Pre-Seed Investment (150 k)
17. Angel Investing (500k). Pitch to 142 investors.
18. Seed Round 1, Pitching+, Lobbying and securing (1 Million USD)
19. Seed Round 2 (4 Million USD)
20. Series A (15 Million USD)
21. Series B (30 Million USD)
22. Series C (60 Million USD)
23. Getting to 1 Billion USD valuation.
24. Exit Strategy (Public C. Acquisition, Privat C.)

We are halfway through this Plan.

We aim to be a solution loved by parents, pedagogical professionals and children with special educational needs. 

The barriers we face as an early stage solution, revolve around credibility and awareness. We hope that winning the prize will allow us to gain more exposition, authority and leverage to grow.

Our vision is to expand to more countries, help more educational systems, and cross the borders in latin-america and then the world.

We hope to get attention from partners like 500 startups and YC combinator, to help us achive new milestones and capital goals.

In our industry of EdTech, having the support of goverments, NGO's and academic institutes is a big advantage. Reaching out to organization like the WHO (World Health Organization), UNICEF, and UNESCO.

Being a Tech Startup, validation from the tecnológico de Monterrey and the MIT, will help us advance further to attract high profile technological talent.