Startups have raised millions of dollars to improve every aspect of the classroom experience, but now there’s one focused on making it easier to actually enroll kids in schools.
San Francisco-based SchoolMint, a new company backed with $2.2 million in financing from investors like New School Ventures Fund, Runa Capital, and Crosslink Capital along with education-focused seed investors including: Kapor Capital, Imagine K12, Romulus Capital, Fresco Capital, and EdMentor VC, is looking to erase the obstacles parents and kids face when applying and enrolling into schools across the country.
“We manage the whole manual process around applications, lotteries and eventual enrollment so that parents can apply to any school in a city,” says SchoolMint co-founder Jinal Jhaveri.
Jhaveri and fellow co-founder Forum Desai, previously worked at an application development company that had been developing one-off enrollment applications for individual schools. After hearing from multiple districts that they’d like similar services Desai and Javeri decided to launch the company.
The SchoolMint app works on Android and iOS, and the company also has a web presence Roughly 60%of the company’s users access its service through mobile devices. 
The company charges on a per-school basis, and a single school will spend up to $3,000 to receive all of the features SchoolMint offers. That includes managing a communication platform between parents and a school, managing the enrollment process, and verifying registration. Schools that order the services on offer a la carte can spend $1,000 for individual service modules, Jhaveri says.
It’s a pretty good deal for schools, considering they can spend anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 per year to hire part-time staff to deal with the enrollment process,according to Jhaveri. “Schools buy us for two reasons. We cut down on the manual work and it gives them more visibility to determine how enrollment is proceeding.”
Currently, SchoolMint operates in 500 schools from 21 different cities across 10 different states, and has plans to expand even further with the new financing.
The company has partnered with Pearson and is in discussion with backend providers to integrate the software into the classroom and curriculum management tools available for teachers and principals.
“Our value proposition for schools is that we are actually cutting down the cost,” says Jhaveri.
Photos via Flickr user Leah Gregg and SchoolMint.