Innovation is a direct result of people seeing problems and creating solutions. Five years ago, a group of passionate parents and educators, including Steven Khuong and his wife, started a preschool program for children with special needs out of the increasing demand for whole-child approaches to Autism; Khuong’s son was diagnosed in 2009. However, their school’s neuro-diverse goals were quickly stunted by the reality of low-tech systems of reimbursement. Private preschools collect money from parents the same way they have since the 1970s, by waiting for signed personal checks. Most parents innocently forget to pay on time, and Khuong found this was especially true for busy parents caring for children with exceptional needs. Sending out reminders was time consuming for their new school too; they needed to prioritize teachers, not bookkeepers. Even emailing payment reminders brought challenges. Keeping track of parent email addresses proved to be time-consuming and a hassle to manage as the programs expanded rapidly, not to mention messages from the school often got flagged as spam or just went unread. So Steven teamed-up with two of his tech friends, Brian Meckler and Ross Lugos, to create a product that would give more parents, particularly millennial parents, a fast way to pay this recurring bill, as well as give the preschool an easy way to collect and track payments. See a problem, create a solution. They built Curacubby. Curacubby is a SaaS product geared specifically toward mobile dependent parents and their children’s service providers to eliminate outdated payment methods, filing systems, and tracking solutions. These savvy co-founders, all three fathers of young children, knew that preschools didn't need another piece of software. Moreover, they knew firsthand as parents that their kids’ preschools didn't have time to integrate complicated technology. Thus, they looked at payment solutions that were already out there, discovering the missing components of a successful preschool vertical along the way. In order to integrate with their existing finance and record-keeping systems, Curacubby leveraged the Envestnet® | Yodlee® Aggregation API to access each school's data, and the Envestnet | Yodlee Account Verification API to identify and validate all accounts in which they provide service, as well as verify account ownership and balance information. Curacubby is part of the Spring 2017 cohort of the Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator, and its founders have been participating in boot camps and training sessions to prepare for Demo Day 2017. For educators and preschool directors looking for an easy solution for receiving payments and tracking school invoices, Curacubby has been successfully serving the private preschool market for nearly two years, including its first little client which has since grown into a pre-k through primary school for Autism certified by California’s Department of Education. For parents looking for a mobile wallet to pay for their children’s services on time and on the go, please visit the Curacubby website. For entrepreneurs and developers seeking to launch disruptive products that leverage transactional financial data, visit the Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator website.
