CHATTANOOGA, TN – Election night in 2008 meant more than the historic presidential election to Ken McElrath, CEO and founder of Skoodat. “We were attending a conference in San Francisco and met our initial angel investor there,” says McElrath.
“It was a wild 24-hour period,” says McElrath. “We had the documents signed, got our first $1 million investment and went out in the streets of San Francsico which were full of shouting people.”
Skoodat went through a convoluted, twelve-year gestation period. First, a West Coast entrepreneur going after the education software space developed a program in DOS. Then Window’s launched. Then, when a Windows version was developed, he realized he needed a Mac version. And so on.
Salesforce.com provided the answer
Finally, however, the company found the solution it wanted when Salesforce.com released its backend for developers to use and the company CEO said, “We want you to use this to change education.”
“We heard that challenge,” says McElrath. “After 12 months of due diligence, we realized this was going to be a revolutionary technology platform for education.”
Skoodat’s goal, he adds, is to “Reduce the total cost of ownership of educational software by 50 percent.”
Skoodat now offers a suite of applications for educators, ranging from course scheduling to communications, student enrollment and registration, grading, performance tracking and more.
Automates the process
Why is it necessary? McElrath explains that it makes something such as making sure students take the right courses at the right time and don’t fall through the cracks much easier.
It offers applications for that. A pre-registration app looks at a student’s previous coursework over the years, what grades they received with a given teacher and evaluates what they need to take. It automates the process.
“It shows the courses they took, the courses they need to take, identifies pre-requisite courses and recommends what they need to do,” says McElrath.
He says that while doing a demonstration of the software, a woman in California told them she had a child who couldn’t graduate as planned this year because her counselor forgot about her freshman English course.
“With our software, that won’t happen anymore,” says McElrath.
Another app evaluates a student’s course and warns if he or she is in danger of not graduting in time.
Seeks a Series A round
“The idea is to dramatically change the game in education by giving people the data they need in real time in format so useful they can’t ignore it,” McElrath says.
The company has already received a committment for its second million in angel backing and received $300,000 of that from its initial backer.
It’s looking for its first Series A round and will be one of 60 companies chosen to present at the Southeast Venture Conference at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA, Feb. 24-25 (see www.seventure.org for more information).
“We’re coming to the conference to present in front of a lot of venture capitalists at once and so we’re on their radar,” says McElrath.
Online: www.skoodat.com
Southeast Venture Conference, February 29 – March 1, 2012 at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner, VA – Where Smart Money Meets Smart People.
www.seventure.org
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