The Chennai Fund, an angel fund facilitated by the Charter members of TiE Chennai has invested in SchoolMate- School Mobile Assisted Teacher, a solution for educational institutions. The product is developed by Bridle Information and Technology Solutions, the first incubated company of BITS Pilani.
The company has raised angel funding from Srinivas Alturi, founder and CEO of Core Providers LLC, and Chandrasekhar Kopparapu, VP at Foundry Networks. Raghu Rajagopal from Chennai fund will join the board of directors of BridleIT.
SchoolMate aims at communicating necessary information of students to the parents in the form of an email, direct web access or even an sms. The product is based on software as a service model (SaaS), which helps keep operating costs low. The product also helps provide services like providing fee related notices, providing schedules on school activities and exams, results, student performance, teacher performance, analysis of financial information, staff payroll, timetable, attendance etc.
BridleIT, which has over 100 employees is started by Ravindra Vytla and Hari Krishnan. The product SchooolMATE is presently being used in two cities - Hyderabad and Vishakapatnam - by 70,000 parents. It plans to expand to five new cities including Chennai and Bangalore, and aims to have a user base of 7 million parents across 55 cities in the next 5 years.
Currently the Chennai fund has 11 investors who have committed to invest a minimum amount of 25 lakhs each. This includes Gopal Srinivasan, Director, TVS Electronics Limited, also the chairman of the Chennai fund, Suresh Kalpathi, Founder SSI Limited and R Ramaraj (Senior Advisor, Sequoia Capital) among others.
