Kinedu Ecosystem

Luis is the founder and CEO of Kinedu, a platform which equips parents and caregivers with tools and knowledge to provide children the best start to life. Kinedu’s technologies provide guidance to over 800,000 parents and educators worldwide to foster early childhood learning and serve as platforms to improve interactions in the first few years of life. .

Luis co-founded Advenio, a corporate daycare chain in Latin America providing services to families across the region in partnerships with multinational and local companies. Luis also serves as president of the Aceleradora de Innovación para la Primera Infancia, an incubator for promising ideas to improve the outcomes of children based in Monterrey, and part of Frontiers of Innovation. Luis graduated from Stanford University in 2006, received his MBA from HBS in 2010, and currently lives in Monterrey, Mexico, with his wife, Paulina, and their three daughters, Paulina, Balbina, and Sofia.

Children start school not ready to learn. We want to improve early child development by providing tools adults can easily use to create high quality experiences for children. Kinedu is a science-based mobile app for parents, educators and caregivers that offers personalized activity plans for children aged 0-4. Kinedu Classrooms, our newest platform, takes the Kinedu experience to the classroom allowing educators create activity plans tailored to their group, which they can do at school and share with parents via the Kinedu app. Aldea, our productivity platform, is designed to  facilitate administrative processes, which will allow educators more time to  create learning experiences.

At Kinedu, we are convinced that by investing in early childhood we are setting entire generations up for lifelong success; we believe in elevating humanity by working with adults to help improve every child’s story.

Early childhood is a critical stage in development. Our brain architecture is built in the first few years of life. According to UNICEF, if children lack proper nutrition, stimulation, and protection, there are long-term negative effects in communities and families. Research shows that high quality interactions with caregivers -parents, educators, etc- have a positive impact on brain development (IADB). 

In Mexico, however, around 20% of children between the ages 3 to 5 are behind on their development; but the number doubles in the most impoverished families (UNICEF, 2018). This trend is also present all around the world.

Millions of parents around the world lack the knowledge and tools to support early child development with age-appropriate everyday interactions. Educators and caregivers as well, are often underpaid and lack the resources at school to create high quality learning experiences for each of their students . This means that millions of children will not be able to reach their full potential, and their future and communities will be affected in the long-term.

Kinedu’s main objective is to connect parents and caregivers around the world with effective, usable science-based tools to support their children's early development. Nowadays, access to a mobile phone and a Wi-Fi connection are not rare to come by; and the need for universal Internet access is more evident than ever. This allows parents, caregivers, and professionals to engage with activities to enhance early child development.

We seek to support caregivers with three platforms: Kinedu, Kinedu Classrooms, and Aldea. Combined, they are the Kinedu Ecosystem, which helps strengthen the relationship among the different spheres in which early development happens. This way, the important adults in the child’s life can follow and contribute to their development. 

While we are providing these platforms to families and educational centers, an important aspect to our work is implementing this ecosystem in underserved communities. We believe that with the combined and constant use of our platforms we can positively impact the early development of many children.

Kinedu is a company founded to unleash child development at scale. We aim to equip parents, teachers, and other caregivers, with usable information and tools to support early child development at home and school, in-person or remotely. Our three platforms -Kinedu, Kinedu Classrooms, and Aldea- integrate into the Kinedu Ecosystem, designed to maximize our impact in early child development. 

The Kinedu Ecosystem benefits children aged 0-4 by providing adults with the tools and knowledge they need to promote early development. Kinedu is meant for parents, caregivers and families; Classrooms is designed for teachers and early childhood professionals; and Aldea is for the administrative tasks of daycare and kindergarten centers. The Kinedu Ecosystem, then, impacts all adults involved in a child’s development.

Our products are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, reaching users around the world -but we are mostly present in the US and Latin America. The technological base of the Kinedu Ecosystem makes it accessible for anyone with an Internet connection and a smartphone, tablet, or computer. Nowadays, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is particularly useful for families whose children are at home, and for educators trying to reach them, to ensure continuity and quality in their development process.

Our work intends to share and create knowledge of early child development to benefit millions of kids. In doing so, we elevate the understanding of people and how we develop and grow in our first years of life. Kinedu provides actionable, science-based tools that adults can use to provide better care and learning experiences to children. We expect that, by using the Kinedu Ecosystem, parents and educators will be more empowered to advocate for policies, investments, and programs that support early child development. We believe well designed content and technology can change attitudes and behaviors towards early childhood.

I started Kinedu while I was working at Advenio, supporting working families with early education and care. During that time, I realized that parents wanted to be involved in their baby’s development but couldn’t find a resource that supported them in that journey of a new parent. We decided to unlock the value that a high quality early childhood setting had, and support parents to provide that experience for their children in the first few years. Initially, Kinedu was a project within Advenio but I soon  realized the potential: parents loved our content, downloaded our app, and shared our product. I decided to spin it off and it has been a stand alone project since 2016. Kinedu has evolved, but the core features remain the same: an assessment to understand development, high quality content, and a personalized, adaptive experience. I realized that we can support not only parents, but also educators and caregivers, with a tool that helps them as much as it helps parents. This way, we connect the whole ecosystem of adults around a child’s life and provide a continuous learning experience for children. During the pandemic, this is more important than ever.

Early childhood has become my life. For my whole professional career, since 2010, I have been serving families and supporting children get the best start to life - granted, focusing on different dimensions, but the problem always seems to be  the same: there is a crisis of quality early experiences at home and at school, which prevents children from getting to school ready to learn. As an entrepreneur, I want to make a positive difference in the world and I believe the best way I can do it is supporting the developmental trajectories of children. At the same time, we empower parents, caregivers and educators to improve the relationship with their babies, creating benefits that should last a lifetime not just for children but for all involved. The ECD space is typically under-resourced and under-appreciated. As a parent of 4 year old twin girls and a 2 year old, I know how tough it is to be around multiple children for long hours. I love having the resources and understanding of their unique ages, and how it helps me be with them. We are in a unique position to support parents, educators, and babies.

I think Kinedu and myself have a unique set of conjoined experiences and skills. On one hand, I’ve successfully run daycares and understand the struggles parents and educators have in and outside of the classroom. I’ve witnessed first hand the struggles of creating a unique and continuous set of experiences for children across any setting and across all stakeholders - a true “village”. I’ve witnessed parents struggle to understand development and ask a ton of questions of how they can get involved. And for the past 6 years, I’ve worked on building a product that solves this problem; and for millions of families, we have done so! Now we turn our sight to educators and believe our experiences and skills position us to create a better product than others. Not only do we understand parents, we also understand educators and, most importantly, the ways to successfully connect them both to create quality interactions with their babies.

I was born with 3 fingers on my left hand. As a kid, I got bullied and called names like “ninja turtle”. This hurt my image and self esteem. However, I wanted to do things, like learning to play the piano. I was 15 when I heard the 3rd movement of Moonlight Sonata and wanted to play it. It is technically challenging, but my professor agreed to teach me. 

Many months later, I mastered it and understood that other people’s image of me should not prevent me from doing anything. This personal story reflects my company’s approach to overcoming challenges. In December 2016, we were an 8-person company, with just three people in our engineering team. Over two weeks, Joel -our only iOS developer- got ill and died. We focused on his family and supported them through Joel’s hospitalization, funeral, and insurance claims. The blow to our morale was huge, but we came together in mourning. We never allowed customers to see a deficient product, as other areas pulled their weight while we found and hired a new developer. We learned that people -families, teams- are what matters most. We also learned that, no matter what, we keep moving forward.

During March, amidst the COVID pandemic, Kinedu realized families had a big challenge: they were stuck at home with young children and needed to continue their education. On Friday, March 13th, COVID19’s spread was declared a national emergency in Mexico, where most of our team is located. Saturday morning, I called my investors and Executive Team to debrief an idea I had: Provide Kinedu for FREE worldwide to all families for 2 months. I had pushback from them all, both in terms of being a cash-sparse startup, and in terms of how fast we could do it. On Sunday morning, after hearing all arguments, I emailed my VP of product and CMO and notified them that we were doing this. Monday was a day off in Mexico,  but we rallied the tech, marketing, and product teams to work Sunday afternoon and Monday. On Tuesday morning, we announced and released Kinedu for free worldwide. I believe this experience with COVID highlights my leadership abilities in several ways: First, principled leadership to serve my community - the global community, in this case; second, decisiveness to act fast; and third, getting ideas into action, rallying and motivating my team to do so.

The Kinedu Ecosystem is unique in several aspects: its technological base, our approach to development, and the integration of the different platforms.

Kinedu’s technological base includes its distribution via mobile technology and the important role of big data and machine learning in our business process and in our model of early child development, which is built based on the responses from thousands of parents around the world to our initial development assessment.

Our development model is innovative in that it sees development through a non-linear lens, a departure from traditional developmental assessments that allows us to capture the nuances of early child development. The development assessment is easy to use and understand so that anyone can complete it regardless of their expertise in early child development. 

Finally, the Kinedu Ecosystem integrates our three stakeholders - parents, educators, and daycares - empowering those involved in the life of young children to connect with one another and provide consistent high-quality learning experiences. This Ecosystem facilitates remote learning experiences, which ensure continuity in child development despite social distancing and the closure of kindergarten and daycare centers worldwide as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. A continuous set of learning experiences between home and school as a new way to think about early education.

Kinedu is truly the first multi-stakeholder global intervention to foster quality adult-child serve and return interactions.

Kinedu provides video-modeled activities personalized to each child’s age and milestones. For educators, this personalization is brought to the group setting and Kinedu Classrooms presents a weekly plan with video-modeled activities that can be adapted to different milestones within a group. Both platforms also present digested articles on ECD, facilitate the evaluation of children’s development with the Kinedu Skills ® assessment, and provide insights into each child’s progress. 

By using all that the Kinedu Ecosystem has to offer, we expect to see caregivers more engaged in developmental activities with the child, and an increase in serve and return interactions. In the case of parents, they will know more about early child development and parenting, will improve their practical parenting skills, and will have a better understanding of their child’s development. Educators, too, will get more knowledge about ECD and will create better learning experiences for their group.

These changes will result in positive changes in children, parents, caregivers, and educators. In children, we expect to see improvements in the four areas of child development: cognitive, physical, linguistic, and socioemotional. In the adult-child dyad, we expect to see a stronger relationship. In educators and parents, we aim to increase self-efficacy and an improved attitude towards their involvement in the child’s development.

Kinedu Serves currently 750,000 monthly active users (MAUs) through its direct to consumer app, and through its most recent product, Kinedu Classrooms, we currently cover over 10,000 students who also have access to the Kinedu app at home. We hope to continue scaling so that families and educators connect with the support from our products. We hope to have 100,000 students in the educators’ app (with access to the family app) and 1.5M MAU’s in the consumer app. In 5 years, we hope to get to 5M MAU’s in the consumer app and 500,000 MAU’s in the educator app - this means that millions of children will benefit from the different platforms of the Kinedu Ecosystem, and the knowledge and tools in the hands of the adults in their lives will translate into a better development.

Our goal is to promote quality interactions between babies and their caregivers by supporting adults. To do this,  we will continue to develop our products and build new ones. In our product roadmap for parents, we envision including professional support for parents, as well as social interactions with other families. For Educators, we envision a tool that helps everyone provide high-quality classroom experiences for children 0-5 regardless of their level of training or background. This includes self-directed learning environments, tools and resources, and even access to professional support. Once this is set, we will move on to other challenges our ecosystem can help solve: How do parents find high quality educators in their community? How can we involve other stakeholders in this process, such as companies and communities? Once we have parents and educators in an ecosystem, we will continue to deepen our impact to solve the structural challenges around the industry. Our goal in the next 5 years is to make as much progress as we can on this.

Financially, we need to ensure that we will have sufficient funds to grow and reach our goals. A major challenge is becoming financially sustainable and increase our sales revenue. 

We also need to continue improving our development model, keeping it up-to-date with new trends and research in early child development, while being able to include this into our algorithms and activities. Another issue is the need to comply with regional regulations of early childhood curricula to be recommended by state and educational authorities.

Our global expansion also poses new challenges. First, we are not familiar with the local early childhood landscape and regulations. Second, we need to better understand early childhood and parenting practices across different places and cultures. As well, we are still to learn about the early childhood environment in those places. Cultural differences regarding parenting, play, and representation in our videos are barriers we are facing at the moment.

We will continue to raise venture capital and work on our path to financial sustainability to increase revenue. 

As well, we continue to work to get better data through our team and also expanding our research partnerships to improve our model, products, and understanding of child development. We are also on the process of creating a Scientific Advisory Board for guidance. 

For our global expansion, we are looking for local liaisons to understand the early childhood environments and dynamics in diverse settings. We want to be culturally sensitive while promoting the best practices in early child development. One step to do this is adapting our videos and materials to reflect the diversity of people who use our app. A key component to succeed in this process is for us to do good market research.

We have a research partnership with Dr Michael Frank and his team from the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Their research has contributed to improve our approach to development and the content of our activities. We have also helped them research parenting attitudes and practices. As well, we are on the initial steps of a research partnership with Dr Phil Fisher from the University of Oregon.

Locally, we have partnered with CENDI - a government-sponsored child care provider. We have conducted short interventions with some of the parents who benefit from these centers, and recently they began implementing the entire Kinedu Ecosystem in their 13 centers. 

We are part of other networks and initiatives that work on early childhood. For example, we are members of the “Pacto por la Primera Infancia” (Pact for Early Childhood), a national initiative to bring together different stakeholders working on early childhood in Mexico. 

Our final beneficiaries are babies and young children, through the engagement of the main users of the platforms of the Kinedu Ecosystem: their parents, caregivers, and educators. 

At Kinedu we provide science-based tools that provide personalized video-modeled activities for children aged 0-4, with plans to expand to children up to age 6. Using our own development assessment, the Kinedu algorithm recommends activities tailored to each child’s age and skills. This is designed either individually in the Kinedu app or for a group in Kinedu Classrooms. Additionally, users can access hundreds of articles and other activities related to child development, parenting, infant health, etc. Our products are provided as apps or online platforms, and are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Kinedu responds to parents’ interest of learning how to better engage with their children and promote their development at home. They need trustworthy information that can be easily transformed into concrete actions. Educators need support to do their very important jobs, so that they can focus on creating significant learning experiences and interactions with the children in their group. With Aldea, we also support center owners and administrators to better manage their centers, and focus more on creating meaningful learning experiences rather than on administrative tasks. 

We are motivated by our belief that we are creating value now, but its impact will transcend the parents and educators who use our apps: it’s about changing the future of an entire generation by contributing to give them the best start in life.

We believe a financially sustainable business is the best path forward for scaling. We do need to continue raising investment capital: it has been one of our main sources of income and, to date, we’ve raised 10M USD in 7 years. We hope to continue these processes as we scale and earn more revenue. Our products are cost-appropriate for scaling, as we price the D2C app at $2.5 USD/Month and the educator platform at $1USD / month. Today we make around $300,000 / month from parent subscriptions, $15,000 / month from b2b SaaS, and will begin to expand around affiliates, partnerships, and other revenue models.

Our revenues come from individual customers both B2B and B2C - 95% being direct to consumer. We have raised investment capital between 2016 and 2020 totaling $10M from sources such as MIT Solve, Dila Capital, Ignia Fund, Stella Maris Partners, Be Curious  Partners, Topaz Capital, 500 Startups, and other notable funds and angel investors.

We will eventually raise equity and debt capital to fund our operations and growths, expecting to raise between $10-$15M US during our next round to fund our ecosystem expansion.

Our estimated expenses for 2020 amount to $8.5M .  We have raised a series A and our revenues to cover this amount and take us well into 2021. Our spend is divided mainly into salaries (product, engineering, business, data) as well as marketing spend, as our goals include scaling and developing technology and content for our ecosystem.

As it is a cash prize, the Elevate Prize can help us fund and test some of the new features of our products. As well, we are interested in the visibility of the Prize and the international networks we can be part of as a consequence. Those partnerships or advice can be incredibly useful for us to reach new markets, and impact the lives of more children, parents, and educators.  We look forward to getting advice to comply with local regulations and reach more pre-K and daycare centers in the United States and other countries, and to be better at measuring our impact. This involves continuous improvement to our development model - via research partnerships and guidance from a Scientific Advisory Board.

We are mostly interested in getting support and partnerships to grow and reach more families and children. Our growth has to be financially sustainable, and allow us to continue improving our products. 

It is important to us to continue measuring our impact, and knowing that our activities and development model are useful and accurate. This includes creating our Scientific Advisory Board and conducting research on early child development.

In terms of marketing, media, and exposure we want to reach out to organizations who would be able to recommend our products to parents and educators. As well, we are looking to adapt Kinedu and Kinedu Classrooms to comply with local educational regulations and become an important part of educators’ day-to-day practice- not just an additional tool.

• We want to partner with organizations who can guide us in the process of entering new markets and being recommended or approved by educational institutions and authorities. This will help us expand and grow across geographies- allowing us to impact more children and their families, and increasing our revenue and financial sustainability.

• We are interested in partnerships with universities, research institutes, think tanks who work on early childhood - either research on child development, policies, parenting & family practices, etc. We are interested in advancing knowledge on early childhood, becoming stronger advocates for child development, and understanding our target users: parents and educators of children aged 0-6.

•  We are also looking for networks of early childhood professionals, organizations, and companies - we want Kinedu to become a leader and referent in the early childhood field.