With Callaghan Innovation’s support, ed-tech startup Orah has created an all-in-one student engagement platform that is being used by some of the best boarding schools in the world. Next target, day schools. From there, who knows.
At a glance
- Orah has developed a platform that helps schools, students and their families track and monitor school life – from managing permissions for excursions to organising co-curricular activities and monitoring student wellbeing.
- In the pursuit of scale, Orah has engaged with Callaghan Innovation to help its team upskill, bring on new talent, and connect with the burgeoning SaaS community. Orah
- Orah is already used in over 17 countries, and is looking to expand beyond the boarding school market and target independent day schools.
That Callaghan Innovation trip was pivotal for us in terms of starting to think bigger and finding businesses we could emulate.
- Kurt Meyer, Co-founder, Orah
Back to school for SaaS entrepreneurs
A mixture of “ambition and naivete”. That’s what Kurt Meyer says propelled him and his Orah co-founder to drop out of architecture school and seek their fortunes as tech entrepreneurs.
But with more than 100,000 active users in 17 countries, with around 250 schools, including elite institutions like the UK’s Eton College and St Mark’s School in Massachusetts, US, the success of Orah, a student engagement platform, was clearly worth it,
Orah’s platform makes managing student life easy for schools, pupils and their families. Bringing together all information in one place, users can keep track of students, plan co-curricular activities, manage emergencies and risk, and monitor student wellbeing.
“There are a lot of well-designed ed-tech products, but they tend to focus on individual pain points, so there’s a lot of fragmentation,” says Meyer. “The main value of our platform is it unifies all of these different processes and data around student engagement.”
Expanding horizons with Callaghan Innovation
Callaghan Innovation has supported Orah on its journey to scale, including enabling it to take on the next generation of tech talent to expand its R&D. This has included using R&D Experience Grants to help the business take on a number of interns over numerous summers, many of whom have gone to be full-time employees.
As well, different events targeted at the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) community have also expanded Orah’s horizons.
This included the 2018 SaaStr Annual - the world’s biggest gathering for cloud-based businesses - where Orah was among the Callaghan Innovation-led Kiwi delegation to San Francisco.
“That Callaghan Innovation trip was pivotal for us in terms of starting to think bigger and finding businesses we could emulate,” says Meyer.
New Zealand’s annual SaaS conference, Southern SaaS, has been another event to prove valuable. Callaghan Innovation Digital Team customer manager Ian Skelton says Southern SaaS aims to inspire, connect, and upskill by sharing insights SaaS entrepreneurs can actually implement.
“One of Orah’s strengths is they’re very good at taking on board new lessons or ideas and running with them,” says Skelton. “Their level of engagement and willingness to learn is impressive.”
Targeting more markets
With a rebrand to Orah signalling the next step on the business’ journey, Orah is looking to expand beyond the boarding school market and target independent day schools – firstly in English-speaking markets and then, potentially, in the larger markets of China and India.
“We had some customers who were already using the technology for their day students, so it seemed like the most natural transition for us to make. It’s taken us a while to formulate the product to fully address that market, but it’s been received positively so far,” says Meyer.
“As a business, we’re always looking at how we can get bigger and, through trial and error, figure out ways to make it happen.”
