Krishnanand Kamath spent 20 years of his life observing and solving inefficiencies to make the lives of the corporations he worked for easier. Now, as a parent to two children, he observes the inefficiencies in his own life and its effects on his family.
The one he struggled most to find a solution for was efficient carpooling. Realizing the toll it took on him and his wife to dedicate hours everyday to taking his kids to schools that don’t have public transportation, he eventually devised the solution himself.
Using his background in software with additional experience in being carpool chair for his children’s schools, Kamath created Carpool.School in order to target a problem in reliable school transportation for busy families and private/charter schools.
The Cary-based startup provides an automated online platform that acts as a control center for schools to manage carpooling families and as an easy-to-use hub for families to self schedule rides and make recurring connections. Carpool.School’s mission is to reduce friction in carpools and remove cars from the road.
Kamath participated in CED’s GRO Incubator last fall, which culminated in a Nov. 16 Demo Day that we covered here.
It’s far from a given for charter and private schools to provide public buses. In 2023, only 55% of NC charter schools provided bus transportation. For one of Kamath’s children who attends a charter school, they do not provide transportation. For his other child, who attends a magnet school that does, it can take up to two hours to get home. So it was technically more feasible for Kamath to take his kids to school himself.
But for parents who work late or can’t afford to drive often, they often turn to carpooling, which can also be a hassle because it can be very difficult to align schedules amongst both parents and kids, especially when kids have different after-school activities.
With the Carpool.School app, every detail about carpooling is provided to help the parent easily and safely find other parents looking to minimize the stress of transportation. All they have to do is find carpools with similar activities and schedules, and they can communicate within the app.
But at its core, Carpool.School is more than just an app for parents to connect with other parents. They aim to target a systemic issue in schools that aren’t focused on providing reliable transportation. That’s why its two-sided platform is designed for schools and administrators to easily manage while still being able to focus on bettering education.
“As a parent, carpooling is not a new concept, we do it all the time,” Kamath said. “But in order for the carpools to work, the schools have to facilitate it and they are not yet incentivized to facilitate it, because parents are the ones facing the problem.”
All administrators have to do is facilitate a sharable code to parents, which will only work for their school’s community. They also have access to a list of users so that they can ensure everyone using the app is a part of their school system and that the kids are safely taken care of.
Kamath emphasized that the benefits to this automated process because it provides an easily facilitated solution that can have long-term positives for both parties, such as less congested carpool lanes at schools and less stress on parents.
Carpool.School is not defined as a rideshare service, but they do provide a means to forming connections between the communities of parents and parents with their schools. With this app, parents can build trust between each other.
What makes Carpool.School different from other carpooling services is that they’re focused on specifically onboarding parents and creating a critical mass of users so that the option to be able to carpool is easier, quicker and cheaper. Carpool.School is wanting to onboard hundreds of users in order to create a pool of willing parents who need the option.
Since its launch at the beginning of this school year, four NC schools have adopted the app and over 400 parents signed up to test drive its capabilities. Kamath is using what he learned from this initial launch and is now re-releasing it to be used by almost every school in the country.
“Our real competition is not another carpooling app, but actually apps like WhatsApp and Google Sheets,” Kamath said. “How carpooling happens today is through texting or a Google Sheet, where organization is very static, manual and painful. We are highly focused on automation; we want to remove friction when you want to use our app, and we don’t want price to become a causing factor to not use it.”
Their pricing model is designed to encourage carpooling, providing a monthly access fee to families for hassle-free carpools and bulk subscriptions for schools to provide for the entire carpool community. In order to drive that active engagement among a critical mass of users, they also offer volume discounts, where with the more users onboarded, the less the subscription would be.
“We created a pricing model that incentivizes the schools to work with us and trigger that societal change,” Kamath said. “The more students, the more parents, the greater the chances you’re gonna find carpooling accessibility.”
He continued, “I’ve lived all my life to create corporate benefits. I think in every community, if you look around in how you do things—just like a corporate organization looks around in how they do things—you’re gonna see inefficiencies. And carpooling is one I strive to solve, in fact even after my kids graduate.”
