From “Refresh Miami” | Riley Kaminer | September 1, 2022
Hollywood-based ClassWallet helps teachers, maintenance crews, and families get access to the capital they need – so schools can worry less about accounts payable and more on educating the next generation of Americans.
Their platform eliminates the manual aspects of purchasing, digitizing the paper trail that made tracking day-to-day purchases a headache.
Now the scaleup reports three-year revenue growth of 916%, landing it spot 779 on the Inc. 5000, a list of the fastest-growing private businesses in the US. ClassWallet has contracts with 19 states, comprising 6,200 schools and 4.1 million students.
Founder and CEO Jamie Rosenberg attributes this rapid expansion in part to ClassWallet’s product-market fit. “We have identified a massive problem in two highly regulated industries, education and government, where there is a need to distribute purchasing ability to a network of users while maintaining compliance control and flexibility for the end user.”
“In the market, there aren’t any other financial technology solutions that are solving this decentralized, compliance-driven spend,” Rosenberg continued. He also noted that ClassWallet has benefitted from more market awareness of late, as they continue to broaden their base of customers.
How will they keep the momentum going? Rosenberg signaled that ClassWallet is investing heavily in expanding its sales and marketing departments, with a particular focus on government sales talent and leadership. “We’re doubling down on where we’re seeing success,” he said. “We continue to see new use cases and opportunities developing organically in our sales pipeline.”
ClassWallet’s team of full-time employees has ballooned to around 160 employees, roughly double from a year ago and 4.5x from summer 2020. That has led the company, which was founded in 2014, to increase their footprint from 1,200 to 3,500 square feet – with imminent plans to add another 1,500 square feet.
Rosenberg underscored that most employees come into the office most days of the week, but determining the ideal setup of their office in a post-Covid world has been tricky. “With the proliferation of Zoom, people can have a lot of sound behind them, so you really do need to sequester them,” he explained. For now, Rosenberg has devised a semi-open solution featuring offices without doors. That way, people can still feel like they are together without necessarily sitting side by side.
Looking forward, Rosenberg sees the market for EdTech continuing to expand. “There’s a growing appetite to innovate and keep costs down. And Covid certainly accelerated everyone’s tolerance to let important stakeholders like educators and parents make purchases themselves, rather than trying to centralize it all.”
In this environment, Rosenberg sees ClassWallet continuing to play an important role. He explained that their growth over the last year has proven the utility of using digital wallets as an end-to-end spend management tool.
“I absolutely believe in the next three to five years, you will see digital wallets emerge as a standard platform in which constituents will be receiving funds – whether it be vouchers, or stipends or other types of funds,” Rosenberg said.
“I truly believe we’re just scratching the surface.”