Naman Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Illumine, joins Sunny Ray to discuss how he built a vertical AI SaaS platform for early childhood education. After years leading engineering teams on data and analytics products, Rastogi's own experience as a parent, including missing his son's first steps because his childcare center failed to communicate them, pushed him to fix the fragmented, outdated systems used across preschools and childcare centers. He explains how Illumine unifies teachers, parents, and directors on one platform, replacing separate tools for enrollment, billing, communication, and learning records, and how AI cuts hours of daily observation writing down to minutes. Rastogi describes the challenge of building AI that speaks each school's unique pedagogical language, the operational complexity unique to childcare compared to K12, and how the company landed its first major US client, a 100 location Montessori chain. He shares why retention, not raw customer or student counts, is the metric he watches most closely, and closes by pointing listeners to illumine.app to learn more.
A dad turned engineer on how missing his son's first steps sparked Illumine, AI built for childcare and preschools.
What is Illumine and what problem are you solving?
We bring teachers, parents, and directors onto one platform for early education and childcare centers. AI removes the manual data entry so teachers get their time back. Writing daily observations for 20 kids can take two hours, and we turn that into ten minutes so teachers can spend more time actually with the kids instead of paperwork.
What made you move from leading engineering teams on data and analytics to building for early education?
My son started at a childcare center in India and important milestones weren't being communicated to us. That was one symptom of bigger problems with the tools available to teachers and staff. I realized 90 percent of brain development happens in the first five years, so getting this right has a lifelong impact. I come from engineering, so I decided to build a better solution myself.
What happened with your son's first steps?
He started walking at daycare, but we weren't told. He walked for the first time at home and we were thrilled, we posted it on social media. The next day the center told us he'd actually started walking two weeks earlier. That gap in communication stuck with me and became part of what pushed me to start this company.
What exactly is broken in communication at childcare centers?
Teachers were taking notes on sticky notes, then entering them into one system during nap time, then copying that into a separate platform to message parents. Everything had been digitized but across five fragmented tools, which actually added more work rather than saving time. We mapped the whole journey, from first inquiry through enrollment, attendance, communication, and assessment, into a single platform.
How did Illumine land its first big US client?
I visited centers on the ground as both a parent and founder to learn the US specific nuances, like billing and pickup systems. I showed directors how Illumine worked back in India and that opened conversations. It led to our first US client, Dost Montessori, a 100 location chain, which became one of our largest customers right out of the gate.
What does it mean to call Illumine a vertical AI SaaS platform?
It means the AI understands childcare specific workflows, like enrollment, allergies, subsidies, and a director's role, not just generic language tasks. We started with paraphrasing and translation for observations and incident reports, but adoption was only 13 to 14 percent until we learned it needed to speak each school's own language and pedagogy. After tuning that context, over 90 percent of observations now go through AI.
What metric do you personally watch most closely?
I don't look at number of schools or students. I watch retention. We've kept nearly 100 percent of our customers unless a center actually shut down, which tells me we're delivering something better than what existed before in this industry. The same goes for our team, I want everyone who joined early to still be part of building this.
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