Why we built Starkid
Starkid started with one stubborn question: why should the most important years of a child's life be the ones their parents see the least?
From a black box to an open window
How Starkid went from a frustration every preschool family knows to a platform that keeps home and classroom on the same side.
Every weekday, millions of parents drop their child at preschool and spend the next eight hours quietly wondering. Did she eat? Did he settle in? What did they make, laugh at, struggle with? The people who know — the teachers — spend their evenings buried in registers, fee books, and a dozen WhatsApp groups instead of planning tomorrow. The most formative years of a child's life were unfolding inside a black box. We built Starkid to open it.
The day disappears the moment you wave goodbye
A child spends more waking hours at preschool than almost anywhere else — yet families get a photo if they're lucky and a quick “he was good today” at pickup. The connection between home and classroom, the very thing young children thrive on, was left to memory and chance.
Preschools run a classroom and a business — on paper
Attendance, fees, curriculum, assessments, daily updates, safety — preschools juggle all of it across paper registers, spreadsheets, and group chats. The few apps that exist are expensive, clunky, weak on privacy, and built for someone else's market. Teachers lose hours to admin; parents are left guessing.
One platform, two apps, built around trust
Starkid puts the whole day in one place: a School app where teachers and admins run attendance, posts, fees, and assessments, and a Parent app where families follow a live feed, get attendance alerts, message teachers, and keep their child's portfolio. Privacy isn't bolted on later — role-based access, ad-free, parent-only views, and full control of your data are the foundation.
An operating system for the early years
We're building toward a single, trusted home for everything that matters in early childhood — attendance, learning, development, and connection — so schools run smoother, parents stay close, and every child gets the best possible start.
Why we're the ones building it
Between us we've spent years building software people rely on every day — a designer who led UX at Visa and Amazon, and an engineer who spent 8+ years as a front-end architect in insurtech. But Starkid isn't a deck or a side project: it already runs a real preschool's daily operations — attendance, posts, messages, enrollments, and fees — with parents and teachers logging in every single day. We built it preschool-first, not preschool-also: phone-and-OTP sign-in with no passwords, strict per-school data isolation, and 270+ endpoints of real engineering discipline — because a parent trusting you with their child's day deserves more than a group chat.
“A child grows best when the school and the parents move as one team — aligned, informed, and on the same side.
Meet the people behind Starkid
A small team with one shared obsession: giving every child the best possible start — and making the daily home-to-school connection feel effortless.
Dinesh Gupta
Co-founder & CEO
14+ yrs UX · ex-Visa & AmazonA product designer with 14+ years in UX, Dinesh led design for Visa's CyberSource enterprise payments platform for nearly six years and shaped payments experiences at Amazon before that. An accessibility advocate, he leads Starkid's product, design, and school experience, focused on making every interaction simple, intuitive, and accessible for the teachers and parents who use it every day.
ConnectBiswa Rizal
Co-founder & CTO
Front-End Architect · 14+ yrsA front-end architect with 14+ years building web products — including 8+ years as Front-End Architect at Qoala, after earlier roles at Tenory and Kuliza. He's also helped more than five startups through their early build phase into successful companies. Biswa leads Starkid's engineering, building the fast, private, mobile-first stack — a School app, a Parent app, and a multi-tenant backend — that families and schools quietly depend on all day.
ConnectThe principles behind every decision
The values that guide everything we build.
Family-First Design
Every feature we build starts with one question: does this help families stay closer to their child's day?
Transparency & Trust
We believe parents deserve a clear, honest window into their child's preschool day — no black boxes.
Stronger Connection
We bring parents and teachers closer together, so the people who care for a child are always on the same page.
Privacy by Default
An ad-free space built for families, where you only ever see your own child and stay in control of your data.
The trusted link between home and school
Starkid aims to be the place where daily updates, attendance, messaging, development, and your child's story all live in one simple, private app — for every family and every preschool.