Fishers-based AfterSchool HQ lands $3M seed investment

Fishers-based education-tech startup AfterSchool HQ has secured a $3 million round of seed funding, bringing the company’s fundraising total to $4.3 million since it was launched in late 2017.

The most recent round of investment was led by San Francisco-based Reach Capital, with participation from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Black Tech Nation Ventures; Indianapolis-based Sixty8Capital, Start Something Ventures and Elevate Ventures; the Bloomington-based Flywheel Fund; and the Chicago-based Ruthless for Good Fund.

AfterSchool HQ was founded by Darye Henry and San Pathak as a spinoff from Henry’s previous startup, a software consulting firm called Reborn Code. (That firm now does business as Wellcrafted Consulting.)

AfterSchool HQ offers a platform that helps youth organizations manage their operations, including enrolling students in programs, communicating with parents, collecting fees, handling administrative work and measuring their programs’ impact. Customers include Indianapolis Public Schools, which uses the platform to help its students connect with after-school and extracurricular activities.

Currently, AfterSchool HQ has six full-time employees, three of whom live in Indiana. The company also has about 10 outside contractors who work for the company from locations around the world.

The company is in growth mode, Henry said, with customers in 36 states plus Washington, D.C., up from 10 states in September 2021. Including both trial customers and regular customers, the platform has seen close to a 338% increase in customer sign-ups over the last year.

Organizations pay a monthly or yearly fee to access the AfterSchool HQ platform. In return, Henry said, the platform can help ease the administrative burden for these organizations, which often operate on a shoestring budget with minimal staff. The platform also makes it easier for organizations to collect attendance data and other impact metrics—information that can help the organization secure grant funding and other types of outside assistance.

“If you can’t report impact, it makes it very hard to get funding and support,” Henry said.

Henry has first-hand experience in the world of youth organizations. His mother, Aster Bekele, founded the Indianapolis-based Felege Hiywot Center in 2004 after her retirement from Eli Lilly and Co. Henry served as the organization’s board chairman from 2008 to 2012.

Henry said he believes that experience, plus AfterSchool HQ’s growth, helped the company land outside investment even though the larger tech industry has hit a slump over the past year.

AfterSchool HQ will use the investment to, among other things, beef up its sales activities.

“Our main goal is to continue to scale our sales and get that growing faster,” Henry said.