Runa Capital, a venture firm operating globally from its offices in Moscow and San Francisco, has led a $2.2 million funding round in SchoolMint, a leading provider of mobile and online enrollment systems for US public, charter and private schools.
Several US funds and business angels have also participated in the round: among them are the New School Ventures Fund and Crosslink Capital, as well as education-focused backers.
“Schools currently spend massive amounts of time, money and valuable resources year-round to manage their admissions processes, provide school choices across districts and cities, predict their enrollment numbers and communicate with parents,” explains the US startup.
“Bringing this antiquated system into the digital age, [we] automate the entire process and provide predictive analytics, helping schools achieve their enrolment goals and saving a lot of time and money for schools and parents,” SchoolMint claims.
One of the company’s founders, Jinal Jhaveri, says that the idea came to him while he was enrolling his daughter in kindergarten.
Since launching in 2013, SchoolMint is currently used by hundreds of Public and Charter Schools, enrolling hundreds of thousands of K-12 students. The funding will be used to further expand the SchoolMint team, its product offerings and to increase the SchoolMint footprint to schools across the country.
Launched in 2010 by Sergei Beloussov, Ilya Zybarev and Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital initially focused on Russia. The fund progressively expanded its scope to global investments, following a strong invest-abroad trend among Russian financiers.
In July this year, the company announced the launch of Runa Capital II with a target size of $200 million. Investors at the first closing came from across Europe, Russia and the USA, with large commitments from investors in Runa Capital I. Schoolmint has become the new fund’s first portfolio company.
