This entrepreneur’s aggregator platform is making the hunt for childcare and preschools easier for parents in India
Being a new mother is hard enough but when Ketika noticed that the early education market is highly unregulated with no easy access to information on daycare and preschool centres, she founded ProEves in 2017.
A lot has been said and written about how motherhood leads women to discover new strength, power, and courage in the self. American writer JD Salinger captured it best in The Catcher in the Rye when he wrote, “Mothers are all slightly insane.” Entrepreneurship then is perhaps one form of such motherly insanity, if you will, springing from a place of unconditional love, and wishing the best for their offspring.
In 2016, Ketika Kapoor was looking for daycare centres for her then 10-month-old baby. Ketika was gearing up to resume working from the office after nearly a year of working flexible hours.
After completing her bachelor’s in information technology from Indraprastha College for Women in Delhi, and an MBA from Management Development Institute in Gurugram, she rose through the ranks in her career as a consultant at Aon Hewitt to a directorial position.
For a mother already saddled with the guilt of choosing to continue with her career, the tedious and disorganised means of reaching out to daycare centres only added to the woes.
"You have to be really lucky to get through to a daycare centre on call; for them to pick up so you can get all the details and requirements. They would usually ask to visit the centre to discuss fees and other details," Ketika tells HerStory.
She realised that daycares in India have no legal pre-requisites and licenses, which makes the industry lagging in transparency, and leaving a lot to be desired in terms of structure and parent-friendliness.
This prompted her to quit her decade-long corporate career for good and take an entrepreneurial plunge. Her idea was to leverage technology to put together a platform to ensure easy access to quality preschool and daycare centres for parents. And so, in 2017, she founded Delhi-based aggregator platform , along with co-founder Divya Agarwal.
It featuring more than 7,000 centres across metro and Tier I and II cities replete with information on age groups accepted, hours of operation, total capacity, and staff to child ratio.
How ProEves works
The startup is now present in metros and Tier I and II cities where preschool and daycare centers can choose to list in general or premium category for children between 6 months and 12-years-old.
For centres that have opted for Edge which is a premium service, ProEves offers in-house assistance through its SaaS support to empower them digitally. Besides subscription fees for preferred listing, the startup earns commission on every booking on the platform. It also caters to over 100 corporate companies to help working parents with childcare needs.
On Children’s Day this year, ProEves launched the LEARN campaign to offer 3000 hours of free learning and support to preschoolers including live and recorded classes.
Navigating the market
Ketika says being the first mover in the space of early childhood education was both a responsibility and a challenge. “Anybody looking to start an ecommerce brand today can look at the likes of Amazon and Flipkart but there is nobody to look up to for ProEves,” she says.
At present the early childhood care and education (ECCE) market in India is dominated by pre-school chains like Tree House Education & Accessories, Zee Learn (Kidzee), EuroKids International, Hello Kids Education India, and Kangaroo Kids Education.
Ketika believes, “The industry is fragmented and unregulated, ripe for disruption, and we are the largest aggregators with quality centres in India, targeting a $3 billion market opportunity that is growing at 20 percent every year.”
Having raised a round of seed funding in 2019, the startup is in talks to raise another round of capital for team expansion, business development, and to scale up its tech capabilities. While Ketika declined to share just how much investment has gone into the company, it claims to have grown eight times with digital adoption from 2020 to 2021 with an ARR of over $1 million. Moving forward, ProEves is focused on transforming more centres into ProEves Edge Centre.
Edited by Anju Narayanan