The Childtech Challenge 2023 Is Here! Meet the Startups That Won This Competition and How They Grew

September 1, 2023 11 min read Impactus Ventures

If you did not know it, you should know that it is a competition where startups from around the world present proven technology solutions with success stories that help girls, boys and young people face the social challenges that keep them from having appropriate development and a life with better opportunities.

Did you know?

More Than 22 Million Children And Teenagers In Latin America And The Caribbean Are Not In School Or Are At Risk Of Dropping Out. (Source: United Nations)
3.6 million children in early childhood (from 0 to 5 years old) did not have early development appropriate for their age. (Source: UNICEF)
Only 6 out of 10 children between 3 and 4 years old receive early childhood education. (Source: UNICEF)
1 in 20 children under 5 is not in the care of their parents, but of a child under 10. (Source: UNICEF)

These are some of the situations millions of girls, boys and teenagers in the region live in, and we want to help you change that reality by taking part in the Childtech Challenge 2023.

There are 5 top-level startups that are already doing it. These companies won the first and second editions of the Childtech Challenge in 2021 and 2022. They managed to bring their solution to new markets, enrich their value proposition, build alliances with strategic partners to implement their solutions, scale their product and accelerate the impact they seek on childhood.

Come along and meet them, and see how they evolved after taking part in this competition.

AFINIDATA

Can you imagine having a personal chatbot that tells you which activities you can do with your children at home to help them have appropriate child development? It already exists and it is called Afini! It was created by Andreana Castellanos, founder of Afinidata, an educational startup from Guatemala that guides the parents of children under 6 in the early stimulation stage. Many parents already use Afini in Chile, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

Afinidata won the Childtech Challenge 2021 thanks to this innovation. The best part of winning the competition is that it helped it enter the Chilean market with the support of Fundación Familias Power, one of the challenge’s implementation partners. Today, more than 1,100 Chilean families use this tool so their children develop appropriately during the first years of life.

The results were surprising. Andreana has seen that parents have a better bond with their children, spend more time playing with them and now know more parenting practices. According to the founder, parents feel safer and more supported by having Afinidata 24/7. The implementation was so successful that the startup renewed its contract for a second consecutive year with Fundación Familias Power to reach more children.

But that is not all. Andreana says the Childtech Challenge also opened doors for forming new alliances and signing contracts and agreements with other organizations, such as United Way Guatemala, where they have already benefited 1,000 families with their technology. This year they are going for 5,000 more. Of course it was not easy. The hardest part, according to Andreana, was integrating this innovation into the foundation’s projects, but at the same time there was a lot of learning about working together and the implementation process.

“It was a rewarding experience. We reached 1,100 families with the help of Fundación Familias Power in Chile, where we had no presence. We got important partners in the country and other regions”

Andreana Castellanos

Matific

Surely one of the subjects that was hardest for you to learn at school was math, right? Fortunately, Raz Kupferman and Shimon Schocken developed a platform that helps children and teenagers learn math in a simpler and more interesting way through games. It is called Matific and it is present in more than 120 countries.

This company won the Childtech Challenge 2022 and, as part of the implementation contract it won, it received support to work in vulnerable areas of the Colombian market. Cafam and United Way Colombia, two organizations with a long track record and impact on childhood, and partners of the challenge, were in charge of leading and facilitating the implementation process in this country.

Paula García, Partnerships and Projects Manager at Matific in Latin America, tells us that the platform has been very well received by management teams, teachers and students. So far, more than 2,000 students use Matific in the 4 CAFAM-associated schools where it was implemented and have improved their math skills and knowledge.

As you surely know, a project like this is complex. Along the way they ran into a challenge. “Projects that incorporate digital solutions still face the difficulty of very uneven connectivity infrastructure between countries and regions. Hybrid schemes or online and offline proposals are key, but it is important that the project design fits the reality of each school, community and territory,” says Luciana Krasñansky, Customer Success Director at Matific in Latin America.

Even so, the road was also full of learning, such as getting to know the educational reality in vulnerable communities, and how important collaborative work between startups and social organizations is to improving children’s lives.

“To create real impact in communities, it is essential to work in a coordinated way with all actors and sectors. Working with Cafam and United Way Colombia gave us allies on the ground, professionalism and commitment to carry out this project”

Paula García

BraveUp

Do you know how awful it must feel for a child who suffers bullying at school? Children and teenagers are harassed and mistreated physically or verbally more often than you think. Brave Up wants to change this reality. To do it, Álvaro Carrasco, CEO and founder of the startup, developed a platform that helps schools learn about the relationships among their students, and manage coexistence in a better way to prevent school bullying and cyberbullying.

Brave Up won the first edition of the Childtech Challenge, and grew significantly as a result of taking part in the competition. It managed to scale its product and prepare to expand to new markets such as the United States and Chile. It implemented the technology in different Chilean schools in highly vulnerable areas with the support of Fundación para la Confianza, an implementation partner of the Childtech Challenge. With Brave Up’s arrival at these schools, 19 thousand students in different regions of Chile benefited.

Getting these results was not easy. During the implementation process there were several lessons and challenges. For example, Álvaro discovered the bottlenecks the platform had and received feedback from the schools, valuable information that he used to improve onboarding and enrich the value proposition. Serious cases of bullying were also found. More than 30% of the students who use this technology have been victims of school violence, and 18% victims of digital school harassment.

Álvaro believes that taking part in the Childtech Challenge and working hand in hand with a foundation with a long track record let him validate his technology and refine it to keep growing. In addition, along the way the company managed to raise a 600 thousand dollar seed investment round with GoAhead Ventures. Our Impactus team also advised him to have a good negotiation.

“We managed to impact thousands of students and tested our technology in places we had not reached. We learned a lot in the implementation, the onboarding and for the expansion in the United States. We improved processes and in a year we scaled to twice as many schools”

Álvaro Carrasco

Storybook

All parents have a problem in common: the difficulty of getting their sons and daughters to sleep properly during the first years of life. Fortunately, the Storybook platform, created by Daniela Vega and Francisco Cornejo, solves this problem. With this solution you can improve children’s sleep routine and strengthen the emotional bond with their parents through stories, music and infant massage that they do themselves. It has more than 3 million users in 150 countries, and won the Childtech Challenge 2022 in the ‘Overall and socio-emotional development’ category.

This company won the Childtech Challenge 2022 and got a double prize by being chosen to implement its technology in both Mexico and Colombia. Enseña por México and Fé y Alegría were the implementation partners in Colombia, who led this project in different children’s centers in Mexican and Colombian territory.

In addition, Storybook developed a version for educators after realizing that many children spend most of the day with them, and that some families do not have access to resources, did not receive an education or have little interest in taking part in building emotional bonds with their children. More than 100 educators already use this tool in their classes.

During the implementation stage they had important findings. For example, only 33% of Colombian children have secure attachment with their primary caregivers (parents), and more than 60% have sleep problems. In Mexico, only 19.8% of the population records secure attachment with their primary caregiver, and an effect on sleep quality can be seen in 69% of children.

Getting this educational tool to children’s centers was a challenging task. For Catalina Aboy, Marketing Partnerships Lead at Storybook, the biggest challenge they faced was getting in contact with families and making sure they really had access to the app, a challenge they overcame by adapting the product to the context and through joint work between the startup, Fe y Alegría and Enseña por México.

“Working together with the organizations is very enriching. It helped us reach another market and gave us the educators’ view to see how our product could help them or how we can improve it”

Catalina Aboy

Beereaders

Has it happened to you that you have to reread because you did not understand what you read? The same happens to many children and teenagers around the world. Fortunately, Rubén Arias and Luis Gringras came up with a way to help them improve their reading comprehension with a platform that contains digital books based on game dynamics and rewards. It also runs diagnostics of the student’s reading comprehension and evaluates their progress to identify opportunities and actions that help improve it.

Thanks to this innovation, Beereaders won the Childtech Challenge 2022 and also got an implementation contract. With this the company took an important step: it reached the Mexican market for the first time and strengthened its positioning in Chile. This educational tool was implemented in Mexican schools associated with Enseña por México, which was the implementation partner.

“The Childtech Challenge let us reach public schools in Mexico for the first time. It was something we had been looking for a long time and had not been able to achieve,” says Rubén Arias, CEO and co-founder of Beereaders.

Following the success achieved in Mexico, the company was able to form an alliance with Enseña Chile to bring its solution to schools in that country. In fact, the platform will be implemented in 25 Chilean schools that add to the schools that were already part of the customer portfolio before the implementation.

According to Rubén, the challenge let them learn and see first-hand how the education system works in Mexico, which gave the company an important boost to position itself in the Mexican market during the first year. They also saw that the problem of reading skills has worsened dramatically.

Rubén points out that before the pandemic, the rate of reading disorders was above 60% and that today it is 70% among fourth-grade children. In addition, thanks to the Childtech Challenge they identified a market opportunity they were not serving: the segment of children who cannot read or who have difficulty doing so.

“Now we are missing a tool that makes the process of learning and teaching reading easier. We saw that we need to adapt our proposal a bit more so more students can benefit. Otherwise we were being left with a rather limited field of action”

Rubén Arias

Now Matific, Storybook, Afinidata, Beereaders and Brave Up are getting ready to keep benefiting more girls, boys and teenagers in Latin America. Just as these companies managed to grow, evolve, enter new markets and improve the lives of thousands of children, your startup can do it too by taking part in the Childtech Challenge 2023.

It is time for them to get to know your innovation and for you to take it to the next level with the help of the Childtech Challenge implementation partners. The call for applications is open. Take part!