iamschool is a Korean startup dedicated to improving communication within the often-outdated education market. With their tagline “Easier Communication, Better Education” the startup, run by parent firm iamcompany, believes that learning can be improved with improved communication and feedback mechanisms between students, parents and the educational institution. For this purpose, iamschool has developed a platform that enables these key stakeholders a means to communicate and collaborate, with the end goal of improving efficiency and results in the education sector.
Going global
iamcompany recently accompanied beSUCCESS to Singapore as one of ten Korean startups that won the chance through the ‘K-APP Global Hub Program’ to go to Singapore for an intensive week of seminars, business matching and networking. CEO, Inmo Chung, stated that the trip was “very helpful since iamcompany is specifically targeting the Singapore market with its service”. He went on to say that his vision is to expand iamschool’s reach through Southeast Asia, with Singapore as the springboard. The team is taking a tiered approach to this expansion, in line with its goals of addressing local needs in order to become more relevant.The first step is to “verify marketability in areas with a similar educational environment with Korea.” Market research is key in this regard, to determine if the “fundamental problems that we have been solving in Korea exist in the target market’s environment”.
More about iamschool
iamschool is the ultimate communication tool for teachers, students and parents, delivering announcements about anything related to school and education. It enables active mobile based communication between school staff and parents, easing the increasing burden on parents and teachers of communicating through existing services, including email and post. The main target customers are parents, students and teachers - who in the past have found direct and timely communication difficult, and where response rates have been low and slow. The aim of Iamschool is to streamline communication between schools and parents and to improve the quality and efficiency of education.
Going beyond a simple online portal for communication, the platform also enables activities that foster learning, such as online coursework, grading and even guidance counseling. According to CEO, Inmo Chung, schools’ online portals can sometimes “lack interactivity, thereby decreasing their value for parents and students. Under these situations, communication is not efficient enough, and is usually inflexible”. Additionally, because most of these portals are outsourced to third-party developers that do not offer support after they finish building the website, schools are often left in the dark as to how to best utilize these resources. But this presents an opportunity to iamschool, and the team plans to disrupt the current model with its online education platform.
Iamschool provides its service for free, aiming to dominate the market and then monetize through targeted advertizing. Iamschool currently boasts over 300,000 users across 1,700 schools in Korea and is actively looking to expand its business into other Asian countries in the near future, initially through Singapore. The company has received seed investment and is looking to secure additional funding for its overseas expansion.
More about this article series:
The KAPP article series will cover each of the 20 startups that took part in the KAPP Global Hub Program, which took Korean startups to two global startup hubs, and is followed with a series of targeted workshops to ensure that the relationships and experience gained during the overseas trips was fully leveraged. 10 startups went to Singapore to discover the South East Asian markets, build partner relationships and gain investment for global growth. The other 10 companies went to Israel to engage with, and learn from, experts in one of the World’s most prolific high-tech centres.
