Sathish Bala had spent decades building software companies, but when he launched his first EdTech company, he experienced a reaction he had never seen.
“The comments were love, hate, empathy, anger—it’s an emotional product,” he said.
Schoolio, the EdTech company co-founded by Bala and which he now leads as CEO, launched a comprehensive l K-8 curriculum aligned with provincial education standards designed for homeschooling parents. Founded in 2019, the pandemic provided a significant boost in users, but Schoolio was built with a broader vision for parents who need to homeschool due to travel, medical reasons, or unique learning styles.
“The minute you try to build something outside the established system, it falls on deaf ears.”
Sathish Bala, Schoolio
Ontario’s investment of $50-million in digital learning in 2020 positioned the province as an exciting opportunity for EdTech startups on paper. But Bala’s experience revealed that to make it in EdTech, startups need far more than funding—they require a deep understanding of how families engage with learning and sensitivity to the emotions that go behind a family’s education choices.
EdTech founders in Canada experience the full range of emotions that go along with building in this space. Rethinking how learning happens means navigating bureaucratic roadblocks and battling entrenched norms, all while searching for the right market fit.
“Education is such a political conversation,” Bala said. “The minute you try to build something outside the established system, it falls on deaf ears.”
Despite these challenges, those EdTech founders who rise to the challenges have the chance to create solutions that redefine learning. That’s where organizations like the Toronto Business Development Centre (TBDC) step in to offer structure, mentorship, and access to an ecosystem that helps companies cut through complexity and scale with confidence.
Finding the invisible customer
Schoolio had a product parents wanted. But figuring out how to sell it was another story.
In the United States, homeschooling networks are well-established, with approximately 3.7 million students being homeschooled as of 2024. Canada’s homeschooling landscape, however, is less defined. Although the number of homeschooled students more than doubled to 83,988 between 2020 and 2021, it still represented a small fraction of the total student population.
“One of our biggest challenges up front was: how do we target a market that’s not identified?” Bala said.
Without centralized distribution, Schoolio struggled to find an efficient pathway to its target market. With guidance from the TBDC community, the company refined its strategy—shifting from direct-to-consumer advertising to partnerships with tutoring centres and libraries.
Through TBDC’s founder network, Bala gained insights that helped him move past the trial-and-error phase and into scalable distribution models. Four years later, Schoolio has scaled to over 10,000 students across nine countries.
But for other EdTech companies in Canada, finding customers is only the first challenge.
Learning the Canadian market
For international EdTech founders, entering the Canadian market often requires a complete shift in how products fit into everyday learning environments.
KidsNanny, an AI-powered parental control software startup, learned this firsthand. Originally built in India, the company’s app helps parents monitor their children’s online activity, flagging risks like cyberbullying, sextortion, and self-harm. However, to appeal to Canadian families, the founders had to adjust their positioning to better align with local expectations, privacy norms, and usage patterns.
“In India, parents are more authoritative,” said Parag Patel, co-founder of KidsNanny. “Here, we had to build a solution where both parents and kids felt comfortable using it.”
Canadian parents expressed concerns about over-monitoring, while children were wary of their privacy being potentially invaded. Patel and his team worked with TBDC to tailor their approach and ensure that KidsNanny functioned more as a safeguard than an outright monitoring tool.
Rather than giving parents unrestrained access, KidsNanny’s AI now flags only potentially harmful content as it aims to preserve trust while still offering protection.
After months of work, KidNanny’s shift brought the app to over 7,000 Canadian homeschooling parents.
For EdTech startups targeting the traditional school system, the challenges multiply.
One country, many opportunities
For EdTech companies selling to public education systems such as school boards, the path to market in Canada is even more nuanced..
While recent school board amalgamations have consolidated some decision-making, they also introduce new challenges. Larger boards tend to be more cautious, have more rigorous procurement processes, and prefer long-term partnerships with established vendors. For startups, which means relationships have to be built earlier.
For Kalaivani Chittaranjan, founder of Mintbook, which provides AI-driven digital libraries and e-learning tools to schools, this made expansion far more challenging than expected.
Mintbook provides AI-driven digital learning solutions designed to make education more accessible, including a curated digital library with eBooks, video lessons, and interactive courses. Its IoT-powered portable library device that delivers offline access to learning materials.
With its ability to bridge digital divides, Mintbook’s technology has the potential to serve remote and Indigenous communities in Canada, where limited internet access and scarce educational resources create barriers to learning.
In India, startups scaled rapidly through partnerships with regional governments. But in Canada’s, where school boards are independently governed, and provincial standards vary, the process requires a new strategy.
“There’s no single entry point,” she said. “Every province has its own structure, its own decision-makers.”
With TBDC’s support, Mintbook learned how to navigate Canada’s bidding systems, where success often depends on long-term public tenders rather than one-off sales. TBDC helped them navigate the ecosystem, introducing Chittaranjan and her team to government procurement officials, local school administrators, and corporate partners looking for digital learning solutions.
Instead of targeting individual schools, Mintbook began bidding on government and public school projects across North America, including a major opportunity with the Toronto Housing Corporation, which was transitioning to digital libraries.
“From our first call with TBDC mentors, they were pushing us to think beyond just the product,” she said. “Connecting with the ecosystem at TBDC, whether it is alumni or existing entrepreneurs, has been a very big support for us. They helped us understand the market, showed us where we fit, and connected us with the right people.”
Mintbook is now running pilot programs with teachers and students, gathering real-world feedback, and this summer, the company plans to host its first Canadian tech event, giving principals and decision-makers the chance to test the technology firsthand.
New ideas meet old rules
Even with demand on their side, EdTech startups in Ontario face a deeper, more stubborn problem: resistance to change within the education system.
Bala knows this challenge well. As a founder, he fought to get his product recognized in a system that wasn’t built for alternatives.
“We weren’t just selling a curriculum anymore,” he said. “We’re selling a new belief system, which was not what we signed up for when we came up with this company, but that’s the job now,” he added.
Now, as a mentor with TBDC, Bala helps other EdTech founders prepare for the same fight.
The resistance to change in education is systemic, he said.. Schools are slow to adopt new technology, and many educators lack the training and resources to integrate new tools effectively.
A 2023 study on digital learning in Canadian post-secondary schools found that while institutions aim to expand digital offerings, inadequate training remains a key barrier to adoption.
For founders, pitching a product isn’t enough. They have to fight inertia.
Now a mentor at TBDC, Bala shares his hard-earned wisdom with emerging founders. He talks not only about finding product-market fit, but also about the mindset and behaviours that shape how institutions make decisions.
“You have to know what fight you’re picking,” he said. “If you’re trying to change the system, you better be ready to push through a lot of doors.”
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Feature image courtesy of Unsplash.