Here at Happity out future looks bright. Recent investment means that we are able to push forward with our plans to bring Happity to more cities across the UK. And connect thousands more families through baby & toddler classes.
Following our hugely successful crowdfunding campaign we have secured seed funding of an amazing £800k. We are now part of the TwinklHive portfolio. And have the backing of Arfah Farooq, via the Ada Ventures Angel Programme. We also have investment from the founders of some of the UK’s best known children’s activity brands. We are delighted to have you all onboard.
Happity just got sparklier
We’re thrilled to announce that we are now part of TwinklHive, the investment arm of digital educational publisher Twinkl!
If you were a parent in the pandemic, you may remember Twinkl as your helping hand for all things home-schooling! They offer over 930,000 resources, with new content added daily. Twinkl is used and trusted by schools and educators in over 200 countries and regions!
TwinklHive is their investment arm, dedicated to supporting mission-driven start-ups to scale. Not only are Twinkl a highly experienced and genuine team of people who are backing us to reach great heights. But they also understand the social mission that underpins everything we do at Happity.
We’re excited to be working with them and other ambitious founders, who are all making a positive impact on the world.
David Angrave, Chief Operating Officer at Twinkl and Investment Director of TwinklHive, says:
We are thrilled to have the opportunity to support Happity as they continue to grow in the UK market. Happity aligns with the mission of Twinkl, to help those who teach. They are leading the way with their platform, supporting activity providers, parents and their children, especially through the early stages of parenthood.
From the kitchen table to the UK’s leading platform
Happity started out when Sara (our co-founder) experienced loneliness as a mother. Plans to create a website and app to list classes for babies and toddlers drawn up at her kitchen table became reality after she learnt how to code. She was later joined by Emily, who had experienced postnatal depression and was on a similar mission to connect parents. Initially Happity covered London. We are now used by over 1.2 million parents a year and are currently available in 20 cities across the UK. This investment will allow us to grow even further. We’re super excited about making Happity bigger and better. And supporting the thousands of small businesses who list with us. As well as the thousands of parents who use Happity to find classes near them to break up the long days and weeks.
Our future looks bright
Founders Sara Tateno and Emily Tredget are both optimistic about what the investments means to Happity’s future:
We’re incredibly excited to be joining TwinklHive and to have also secured the backing of Ada Ventures via their angel programme, which is increasing diversity within the UK’s startup eco-system.
This funding will help us grow our reach across the rest of the UK. We hope our story will also inspire more mothers, many of whom are at risk of leaving the workforce, to become leaders and create the change they want to see in the world.
Angel investment helping us spread our wings
Emily and Sara are thrilled too to be backed by Ada Ventures. Their investment will help us spread our wings here at Happity and help thousands more parents across the UK find baby & toddler classes near them to help ease the loneliness of early parenthood.
Ada Ventures is an early-stage VC that finds and funds extraordinary talent, building breakthrough ideas for the hardest problems we face. Ada’s mission is to make venture capital accessible to the best entrepreneurial talent in the UK. We are delighted that our Ada Angels programme continues to support a new generation of angel investors as they continue to break down the barriers in the UK tech industry. We’re excited to expand our angel programme to support 20 new Ada angels who are either Ada scouts or scale-up operators across our three sectors, climate, healthcare & ageing and economic empowerment.”
Check Warner, Founding Partner at Ada Ventures
We’re really excited about the future of Happity and bringing Happity to more and more places across the UK. We’ve got an amazing team in place all working super hard to make this happen as soon as we can.
We’re thrilled here at Happity to win the Tenacious Team award from Employment Hero!
It’s an award given to teams who have overcome challenges together in the past two years. To recognise how hard they have worked – pulling together as a team to overcome adversity.
We all know how hard the past couple of years has been for small businesses. This makes winning this award mean even more to us.
Our tenacious team pulling together through covid
In March 2020 all our lives changed overnight. And almost overnight we had to put a new plan in place to save our business. And the thousands of small businesses we work with at Happity.
We helped our class providers get 32,000 classes online at the start of the pandemic. Many over the first weekend! We quickly made changes to our site to enable online classes. We trained providers in Zoom. And together we set up a vital support of online classes for all the new parents bringing up a baby during the pandemic.
Dealing with tears over Tiers
As we went through the pandemic and things slowly opened back up – things changed again. Whenever there was a new announcement about what was allowed/not allowed at each point it was often really hard to interpret what it meant for class leaders and how they could run their classes. Remember the complicated Tiers system? And the rule of 6 with strange exceptions and weird rules about singing?
The parent & child sector fell through the gaps in covid guidance. Classes struggled to reopen with the rest of the economy as local councils mistakenly closed legal operations and threatened fines.
Sara became an expert in deciphering government rules. And in translating them so that our class providers knew what it meant for them.
Happity became the go-to for class providers seeking help with reopening. As well as the DfE’s go-to consultant on writing appropriate covid guidance for the sector.
Emily played an integral role petitioning Government to enable parent and child classes to return safely. This resulted in changing legislation, getting on to the Spring 2021 Roadmap, and being nominated for Petitions Campaigner of the year alongside Marcus Rashford!
Behind them both – as they worked so tirelessly – there was a small but tenacious team here at Happity beavering away to keep everything afloat.
Post-covid and we’re getting bigger and better
Once lockdowns were lifted and life was back to normal it would have been easy to have a big sigh of relief and take it easy for a while. But this past 12 months has been our busiest ever.
We ran a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign. We raised funds to enable us to expand more rapidly to help more parents and providers, quickly.
Over the last year a staggering 1 million parents have used Happity to find baby & toddler classes near them.
We’ve grown from a team of 6 to a team of over 20.
And we’re expanding across the UK.
Pre-covid we were just in central London. Over the past year we have expanded across Greater London, and launched in Birmingham and Bristol (as well as growing organically in other UK locations). We have huge plans to grow across the UK in the next 6-12 months. So if Happity is not in your area yet – keep your eyes peeled as we hope it will be very soon!
Here’s to our Tenacious Team
We’re thrilled to win the Tenacious Team award. We have an amazing and passionate team who really care. About our mission and our values. And making Happity bigger and better. To connect more and more parents through baby classes.
Thank you too to our wonderful community of class providers. We can’t do any of this without you. And so we raise a glass to you too as we celebrate this win!
Win an amazing £200 to spend on booking baby & toddler classes.
Hurry though – as our competition won’t be around for long.
Read on to find out how to get your hands on £200 of children’s activity classes.
Win £200 of baby & toddler classes – How to enter
Every time you book a class on Happity from 20th November to midnight on 5th December you will be automatically entered into a free prize draw to win £200 to spend on booking more children’s activity classes.
Head to Happity to find a class near you that you’d love to book, hit the BOOK NOW button and you’re in the draw. It’s as easy as that
Each time you book a class you will get another entry. 1 lucky parent will win £200 worth of classes.
Each time you book you support a small business
We’re running this competition to highlight #SmallBusinessSaturday, which is on the 3rd December.
This year we were delighted to be chosen as one of the #SmallBiz100– one of the most inspiring small businesses of 2022. Happity supports the thousands of children’s activity providers who list their classes with us. All of those are also small businesses. So – every time you book a class on Happity you are supporting them too.
It really does make each and every small business provider do a happy dance.
For a free entry to our prize draw head to our social media pages and leave a comment on the competition posts.
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