Qualla Systems watches over the safety of school-aged children

The startup Qualla Systems has developed the Qualla Kids application to guarantee families the safe collection of children from schools when parents are not the ones performing this task. With a single click, information is provided and the work of teachers who must look after students is facilitated, allowing the educational center to have a useful and updated record very quickly about who will be responsible for the minor upon leaving school.

It was in 2017 when Carles Porta, his son, and a couple of friends from Sabadell "openly reflected" on the safety levels surrounding the departure and collection of children from schools. Now, with Qualla Kids already launched since December 2021, they know for sure that on average, each child is picked up from school by seven different people throughout a school year.

This frenzy "is a difficult situation to manage both for families, because many times they have to improvise on the fly who will take care of the child when school hours end, but also for teachers and schools who have the minor under their responsibility until they cross the center's door," explains Porta.

That's why they created Qualla Kids, a digital tool designed and developed in Catalonia, agile because it is managed with a single click, easy because it requires no learning, and secure because everything is registered ---who has picked up each student, each day, and at what time--- and this protocol can be introduced within the ISO 9001 of the centers or improve their compliance. In short, it effectively and immediately solves specific moments of tension and confusion, both for educational centers and for families, providing verifiable data and much rigor, argue from the company.

Currently, Qualla Kids has already been successfully implemented in 78 centers in Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands, and more than 7,700 users are already using this tool, with more than 420,000 pickups registered to date. The entry into Valencia has been made through an agreement with the federation of schools and in the Balearic Islands by providing service to 50 facilities for extracurricular activities, Porta explains to The New Barcelona Post.

The application aims to digitize academic management tasks that are now carried out with cumbersome and inefficient processes

To develop the project, Qualla Systems has just closed a financing round in which it has exceeded 250,000 euros, led by EconomistesBan, the private investor network of the College of Economists of Catalonia (CEC), and which has brought in several business angels, including independent consultant Francesc Santin. The company currently has a valuation of one million euros. Two investors will join the startup's monitoring committee, which is the body that supervises the business and its growth.

Qualla Kids presented itself at one of the investment forums regularly organized by EconomistesBAN to channel private investment. Since its creation in 2012, the network has held more than 47 meetings with hundreds of evaluated projects. The total investment reaches 2.7 million euros, which was channeled into 31 business projects.

A tool that evolves

Now it's time to accompany the growth of Qualla Kids. While initially it was conceived to cover the needs of families with children up to 10 years old, "later it was seen that there are other needs that are not digitally covered either," specifies the firm's CEO.

He refers, on the one hand, to other types of academic management such as authorizations to participate in activities inside and outside school, image rights, the use of the dining room in specific cases or due to diet variation, justified absences, and also the arrivals of those children who, already in secondary school, go to school alone and "Qualla Kids can be used to notify parents of possible absences."

"We will transform Qualla Kids into a digitalization tool for all daily academic and parental management processes, establishing secure protocols for procedures that are currently cumbersome and not executed in real time, and we will enhance bidirectional communication between families, teachers, and the school," specifies Carles Porta.