Munich Startup: Who are you and what do you do? Please introduce yourselves!
Edjufy: We are Marcel Walberer (26), co-founder and head of product management and sales, and Laurenz Glück (25), co-founder and head of development of the Edjufy platform.
Marcel now looks back on several years of experience in the implementation and support of complex software solutions with a focus on ERP interfaces, CRM systems and cloud architecture. As a technical project manager, he supported many renowned customers, coordinated developer teams and created technical concepts for developing complex systems. His professional experience ranges from agencies to DAX-listed companies, so his experience and process-oriented thinking qualify him perfectly for product management and cooperation with schools.
Laurenz started as a software developer in a Munich internet agency. There he quickly took responsibility for implementing large software projects in a broad range of industries and gained a wealth of experience in the field of software development. By switching to the startup world, Laurenz was able to gain a great deal of valuable experience in developing a highly scalable internet platform while working for a Munich startup. With so many years of experience in software development, Laurenz is now responsible for the development and infrastructure of the Edjufy platform.
Laurenz and Marcel have know each other since their school days and founded a small agency for web design and media technology on the side in 2013. It was while working on a project for a school website in 2018/19 that the idea to develop Edjufy was born. Since 2020, Laurenz and Marcel have been working full time on the further development of the Edjufy platform.
Edjufy: “We want to give our schools more time for what’s essential – educating our kids”
Munich Startup: What problem does your startup solve?
Edjufy: With our product Edjufy, we’ve committed ourselves to the challenge of digital support for school administration and communication – because many schools have yet to arrive in the digital age. Letters for parents are still handed out in paper form, which takes up a lot of teachers’ valuable teaching time. Parents still call in to say their kids are sick, and lists of absent and excused students are still compared by hand in the secretary’s office. Attendance lists are looked for, forms are printed out and paper file folders are maintained for repeated tasks that are always the same.
This is where Edjufy comes in. With Edjufy, we’re giving our schools a high-performance and automatically scaling internet platform that takes care of exactly these tasks. We offer our customers a host of modules that securely digitize the administrative and communicative challenges of a modern school to actively help users with the everyday school routine. We would like to overcome communication barriers with Edjufy and to give our schools more time for what’s essential – educating our kids.
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“Digitize processes instead of just electrifying them 1:1 from paper into the computer”
Munich Startup: But that’s nothing out of the box!
Edjufy: It’s true, there are some isolated solutions for different administrative tasks in schools. But at Edjufy, we see our product as a holistic solution that is unique in the market with its breadth and its modern technological approach.
What’s particularly special about our platform in addition to its flexible application is the connectivity between the modules. This means the Edjufy modules share information with each other, which offers an ongoing process and the highest possible added value.
Another special feature is the approach to planning and further development of our product. In order to design Edjufy to suit the administrative challenges of our schools as best as possible, we rely on close collaboration with teachers, secretaries, principals and parents.
This makes it possible for us to digitize and simplify processes with lots of know-how and lots of input from our partner schools instead of just electrifying them 1:1 from paper into the computer.
Munich Startup: What have been your three biggest challenges so far?
Edjufy: Our product is a holistic platform solution for schools, which means it needs to be modular and easy to expand. So we faced the biggest challenge right at the beginning and long before our first module. It needed a solid foundation that can be used by all schools and is also easy to expand.
The second challenge that we also faced quite early on was the performance and availability of the application. We knew from the very beginning that schools, teachers and guardians expect an application that is fast and functions well at all times. Just having big servers is no longer enough to make something like this work in this day and age. Which is why the Edjufy system landscape is composed of individual, automatically scaling components that have allowed us to realize an independent parallelization of different services.
That means we’re in a position where we can handle an increased number of users as well as peak loads, for example between 7:30 and 8:30 am. In these cases, for example, an additional backend instance is booted up to handle the load and then automatically shuts back down after the load has subsided. With this technology, we guarantee our users a high-performance application at all times and do so with the lowest infrastructure costs and carbon emissions.
And that brings us to our last challenge: data protection and selecting a data center. In terms of both technology and data protection, we place the highest demands on our data center operator here at Edjufy.
First, the data center needs to have a C5 certificate from the BSI (German Federal Office for Information Security) to even be allowed for use by public authorities. Moreover, the operator needs to support cutting-edge technologies, such as Managed Kubernetes, be carbon neutral and, now with the latest political data protection developments like “Schrems II” and “CLOUD Act,” have its headquarters in Germany. The detailed list of requirements was much longer and there were only two operators who were in the running in the end, with T-Systems leading the way as a German company.
“Every school board and every funding agency in Germany will know who we are”
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, and where in five years?
Edjufy: Despite the “corona pandemic” wake-up call, a lot of schools still don’t see a need for digital support in their administrative processes. Which is why our goal for next year is, in addition to reaching as many digitally-oriented schools as possible, to also win over the schools that still have a critical view of digitization. And regardless of which company and which systems the schools decide to work with, there needs to be a shift in thinking and we definitely want to drive that forward.
If you look a bit further into the future, then you could say all indicators are clearly pointing towards growth. In the next five years, we would definitely like to be one of the industry standards in Germany for school software and want to at least be in the selection process for the basic configuration of every new school. Every school board and every funding agency in Germany will know who we are and at that point our system will also be used in schools in other European countries.
Munich Startup: What do you think about Munich as a startup location?
Edjufy: As natives of Munich, the city was of course the obvious choice of location during our founding stage. But Munich also plays a decisive role for startups. On the one hand, Munich magnetically attracts people – especially IT staff – from many different cities and countries. And on the other hand, you have the many Munich training companies and universities that supply the local job market with many young people with excellent basic skill sets.
Munich Startup: Quick exit or staying power?
Edjufy: The interplay of our customers, our product and our industry is perhaps somewhat special when compared with B2B startup solutions. And considering that our mission to support schools and give them more time for education means a lot to us personally, a quick exit would seem to contradict that fundamental idea. So without a doubt: staying power.