If you asked me what ELIIS really is, I wouldn’t start with a typical sales pitch or list all the modules ELIIS offers. I’d tell you why we started building ELIIS in the first place.
I’d tell you about a teacher who sits down after a long day, once the children have already gone home, trying to analyze each child’s individual development goals. Or a parent at work during the day who opens ELIIS to see how their child is laughing, drawing, or discovering something new.
I’d tell you about our team, whose eyes light up every time we receive a message from a teacher saying: “Thank you for listening. This is exactly what I needed.”
Because ELIIS is not just software.
It’s a way of caring.
A municipality’s concern
If anyone thinks that ELIIS was born from an ambitious business plan or a dream to build the next unicorn – that’s not how it happened. Our beginnings were far more humble.
One local municipality was facing a very practical and very human challenge: they didn’t know what exactly was going on in their kindergartens. How was the catering really functioning? How full were the groups? What was the status of resource use?
We decided to help.
We didn’t promise a revolution. We simply offered,
“Maybe we can create something together?”
And that’s how it started.
And then, we stepped into a world that slowly, but profoundly changed us.
Eliis seminar 2017
Kindergarten as a world of its own – full of creativity, care, and... systemic chaos
Unless you’ve been part of a kindergarten’s daily life, it’s hard to imagine how much teachers actually do. And how deeply they care about every moment of it.
Even we the founders of ELIIS started more from a parent’s perspective. We didn’t fully grasp what it meant to be a teacher or part of the leadership team in a preschool. But when we began visiting kindergartens, we saw it firsthand:
Teachers pouring part of themselves into every activity.
They planned learning activities, tracked development, documented observations, communicated with parents, organized events, filled out reports, and supported each child individually – all at once, and often without compromise.
But we also saw how lonely and underappreciated this work could feel.
So much essential information about children’s growth was hidden away in physical folders. Incredibly creative activities, carefully planned by teachers, existed only on paper on their own desks. In larger kindergartens, it was hard for leaders to keep track of what teachers were actually doing. And parents were often unaware of the amazing things happening during their child’s day.
This wasn’t anyone’s fault.
It was simply a lack of time, fragmentation, and noise in the system.
First office 2016
ELIIS wasn’t born from an idea – it was born from a mission
Out of that seemingly simple need, the real mission of ELIIS was born:
We’re not just building a platform for data management. We’re trying to give teachers their time back and make kindergartens more transparent and collaborative.
We set out to build a system that would be:
a teacher’s desk, a parent’s window, a leader’s toolkit, and a municipality’s compass – all in one.
That kind of system can’t be built in Excel.
It can only be built hand-in-hand with the people who will use it.
And that’s exactly what we did. From the very beginning, we worked side by side with teachers.
Our features don’t emerge from boardrooms or academic research alone. Each module in ELIIS is a response to a real question, a real challenge, posed by a real person.
And that will always be our approach.
Tradeshow in 2015
So what does ELIIS actually do – in real life, every day?
The true value of ELIIS isn’t in the technology. It’s in the clarity and simplicity that help educators focus on what truly matters: the children.
Here are just a few of the ways ELIIS supports educators and kindergartens every single day:
Tracking and supporting children’s development
Teachers can document development daily, write observations, evaluate goals, fill out developmental profiles, and share them with parents and management. This builds a full picture of each child’s growth and supports personalized learning.
Planning and sharing educational activities
With ELIIS, teachers can plan, save, and share weekly, monthly, or project-based activities/plans. They can also reuse or adapt past lessons and collaborate with colleagues. This creates a shared knowledge and creativity network.
Kindergarten administration and management
From worktime tracking and meal planning to event scheduling, staff management – ELIIS helps kindergartens manage everything in one place. The result: less confusion, more clarity.
Parent communication
Millions of messages, photos, videos, and feedback items flow through ELIIS every month. Parents feel connected to their child’s day and can easily get in touch with teachers. It fosters cooperation, not distance.
And the best part?
It works – because we constantly listen to the people we build it for.
Eliis team meeting
The team – our greatest strength
Whenever someone tells me that ELIIS is a great platform, I always respond:
“That’s thanks to our team.”
We have amazing people working in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. Our developers, designers, support specialists, sales and marketing teams. All of them believe in what we’re building.
We don’t always get everything perfect. We only manage to implement a fraction of the ideas we’d love to bring to life.
- We make mistakes.
- We fix them.
- We argue.
- We improve.
But we all share a common goal and deep motivation. And without the ELIIS team, there would be no ELIIS.
Because our people don’t just build software.
They help make education better – every single day.
Our Estonian and Lithuanian colleagues
Why did we create this blog?
Because we want to be even closer to you.
To share stories, ideas, insights.
To show how ELIIS works, who builds it, and where we’re headed.
To lift up the voices of educators, spread best practices, and speak honestly about the challenges too.
This is a space for heartfelt conversations – the way we really are.
If you’re a teacher, a director, a parent, or just someone who cares about education then this blog is for you. And you’re warmly invited to contribute as well. If you’d like to share something, just reach out to us.
Thank you for being part of this journey.
We’re only getting started.
And the best stories are still ahead.
With warmest regards,
Rasmus
CEO and Co-Founder of ELIIS
