Most software founders want to build the next unicorn. Kate Jillings and Sian Morley-Smith built something less glamorous and, so far, more durable: the back-office system that hundreds of schools and universities quietly cannot run their alumni offices without. It is called ToucanTech, it was born in London in 2014, and its whole pitch fits on a napkin - stop paying for five tools when one will do.
The idea did not arrive as a lightning bolt. Before ToucanTech, Jillings and Morley-Smith ran BusinessBecause, a news site for people applying to business school. They built it, grew it, and sold it. Along the way, the universities and companies they dealt with kept describing the same hole in their operations: no single place to keep track of their communities - the students, the graduates, the donors, the people who had drifted off but might come back if someone bothered to ask. The founders heard the complaint enough times to treat it as a brief.
"Many education and charity organisations do not have the luxury of large teams to manage their community activities and encourage donations."
Kate Jillings, Co-founder01 / What It Actually DoesOne system, not seven tabs
Strip away the category jargon - CRM, AMS, engagement platform - and ToucanTech is a single place to run a community. There is a database at the centre that holds everyone's details: where they work now, which events they came to, what they gave, how they engage. Wrapped around that database is a public website or a private members' portal, an email engine, an events system, online payments and donations, plus directories for groups, mentoring and jobs. A school can build the site, send the newsletter, sell the reunion tickets and bank the donation without leaving the software.
The quiet trick underneath all of it is data hygiene. Alumni databases rot fast - people move house, change jobs, switch email addresses - and a stale list makes every campaign weaker. ToucanTech leans on the members themselves to fix this. When someone logs into the portal to check an event or read an update, they can correct their own record, and the change flows straight into the CRM. The database, in effect, cleans itself.
02 / Who Buys ItTwo-person offices doing ten-person work
ToucanTech's customer is rarely a big institution with a dedicated technology team. It is the advancement or development office - often one or two people - inside a school, university, or membership association. These are the teams asked to keep thousands of alumni warm, run the annual reunion, and hit a fundraising target, usually with a spreadsheet and a lot of goodwill. Vendors say the platform hands those teams back somewhere in the region of ten to fifteen hours a week that used to disappear into copying data between systems.
The client list runs from British independent schools - Tonbridge, Chigwell, King's Canterbury, the Winchester College Society - to universities and associations further afield, including Tanglin Trust School in Singapore, The Hutchins School in Tasmania and AIA Philadelphia in the United States. Between them, those networks reach well over a million people. It is a niche, but a deep one, and the same product logic applies whether the community is a 500-pupil prep school or a national professional body.
03 / The ProblemWhy the drawer full of subscriptions fails
The failure mode ToucanTech targets is not dramatic. It is the slow drag of disconnected tools. The website lives in one place, the mailing list in another, the donation platform in a third, and the master list of who-is-who in a battered spreadsheet that only one person understands. Every campaign starts with an export and an import. Every reconciliation is manual. When the person who understands the spreadsheet leaves, so does the institutional memory. Consolidating all of it into one database is less exciting than any single feature, but it is the thing that actually saves the hours.
The moat here is not a feature. It is the quiet fact that once a community lives inside one system, pulling it back out is nobody's idea of a good week.
On why all-in-one is sticky04 / The ModulesWhat's under the hood
05 / The FieldWhere it sits in the market
ToucanTech competes in a crowded but unglamorous corner of software. On one side sit dedicated alumni-networking platforms like Graduway (now part of Gravyty), Hivebrite and Almabase, which lean hard on community and mentoring. On another sit the heavyweight fundraising CRMs such as Blackbaud's Raiser's Edge, built for large development shops with budgets to match. ToucanTech's position is the middle ground: broader than a networking app, lighter and friendlier than an enterprise CRM, and priced for the small teams that make up most of the education and membership world.
Its differentiator is less any single capability than the refusal to specialise. Rivals tend to be very good at one thing - the portal, or the donations, or the events. ToucanTech's wager is that the customer would trade a best-in-class widget for a system where the website, the mailing and the money all share one contact record. For a two-person office, coherence beats depth.
06 / The BusinessA slow-burn playbook
The company's growth story is notably free of fireworks. ToucanTech is B2B SaaS in its most classic form: annual subscriptions, tiered by the size of the community and the modules in use, with onboarding on top and room to expand as customers switch on more of the platform. It has raised one publicly reported round - £1m from Pembroke VCT in June 2020 - and, rather than chasing the next raise, has grown by keeping customers and adding modules.
The team reflects the same temperament. Around sixty people work across four offices - London, Lisbon, Sydney and Washington D.C. - which is an unusual spread for a company that has raised so little. It suggests a business run on revenue rather than runway, following its customers into the markets where alumni fundraising is a mature habit.
07 / The PeopleFounders who noticed twice
Jillings read PPE at Oxford before commercial roles at GlaxoSmithKline, BNP Paribas and the payments startup TruRating, then BusinessBecause. The through-line across that CV is a knack for spotting what an underserved market keeps asking for and handing it to them. ToucanTech is the second company she and Morley-Smith have built together, and they run it as co-CEOs. In the early days, according to the company's own telling, the product came together on hot-desks fuelled by caffeine and late nights - the origin story shared by most software that later looks inevitable.
"Kate and Sian are exceptional founders who have developed ToucanTech into a platform that can really help schools and charities with operational efficiencies."
Andrew Wolfson, Pembroke Investment ManagersThere is a small joke buried in the branding that turns out to be the strategy. The team calls itself "a group of tenacious toucans," and toucans, famously, move in flocks. The product exists to keep flocks together - to make sure that the graduate who left twenty years ago still gets the invitation, still sees the appeal, still feels like part of something. Software that keeps people in touch is not a new idea. Building it specifically for the institutions that have always been bad at it, and making it dull enough to actually get used, is a narrower and more useful one.
Whether ToucanTech ever becomes a household name is beside the point, and probably contrary to it. Its ambition looks smaller and steadier: to be the thing the alumni officer opens first on a Monday morning, and never has to think about again.