School payments platform Kindo sees surge in parents helping other kids
Sunday, 17 May 2026
It’s been helping parents pay for all things school-related for 15 years, and now education fintech platform Kindo says it is seeing a rise in the number of people using its services to cover school costs for other people’s children.
Kindo, contracted by schools whose parents use the platform to pay school or sport fees, donations and other school related costs, began as essentially an Uber Eats for healthy school lunches.
Now, 15 years later, while it still has a hand in school lunches, the platform - which works with a third of all schools in the country - is seeing fast growth in its fundraising, give-back and pay-it-forward features.
“It’s actually growing quite a bit right now, and it's a pretty neat social change,” Kindo chief executive Chris Maclean told Sunday Star-Times.
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So far 23 schools are using its pay-it-forward feature, enabling parents to help others within the same school pay for everything from stationery, books, lunch, camp and school trips through to school balls.
“The 2026 value is currently trending over 50% higher than last year, indicating that generosity within parent communities is on the rise.”
The app has raised $319,000 to help buy shoes, jackets and lunches for kids through its give-back programme, and this year raised over $80,000 to go back into schools from its lunch service.
But the Auckland-based company has commercial as well as philanthropic aspirations. Kindo has ambitious plans to grow its business 10 times by 2030 to achieve an annual revenue of $50 million, from $5m a year currently.
It aims to do so by promoting the fact it will cut down the time schools spend on administrative tasks.
“There's a massive volume of bank deposits that come into a school and someone needs to define who that's come from and what it's for, and it becomes a massive administrative overhead,” says Maclean.
“We're trying to automate that process so schools have got more time to spend on educating rather than counting the beans.”
It also claims the amount of school donations paid are 40% higher for schools using the platform.
Back story
Chris’ sister Sandra Maclean founded the business in 2010, prompted by trying to find nutritious food in the school canteen for her children on days when she had nothing in the pantry. It was still an era in which tuck shops were full of pies and doughnuts.
Sandra’s brainwave was to connect local cafes to local schools to combat the problem - one shared by many of the parents they knew. The key was to create a system that would facilitate those transactions.
“The cafes were keen and the schools said they would be happy, but didn't want any more hassle, and so she basically created this idea of taking parent orders, handing them over to the cafe, and the school became the delivery point,” Chris says.
“That started off as a text message service way back in 2010 and over time evolved into an app with 282 caterers on our system today, supporting hundreds of schools and we curate various menus.”
These days, one third of the business done on Kindo is still the lunch offering, while the rest is facilitating payment for fundraisers, sports, donations and school trips. The company charges schools and lunch vendors to use its platform, as well as parents for lunches.
Based on Auckland’s North Shore, Kindo secured $15m in capital from tech investor Movac in December, the first time it had taken outside investment.
Maclean says that gave the company huge growth potential, with a strong pipeline of product development underway.
Its team of 35 is growing and it anticipates by the end of the year that number will be about 50, with most of the new hires to be in its product and development teams.
Just over 400,000 students have access to Kindo, and the platform has a stronghold in Auckland, although Canterbury is beginning to take off in terms of uptake, alongside Bay of Plenty and Tauranga.
Kindo wants to become “a world leader in family-friendly finance” and is working on updates and refreshed notifications, advanced prompts to remind parents when school activities like camp registrations close, as part of its efforts to solve what Maclean describes as “that parent stress of your kid missing out”.
Aside to striving to get all New Zealand schools using the platform, the long-term goal was to take the business into new international markets, within the next three years.
Maclean has ambitions for Kindo to become the country’s next Xero: “I spend a lot of time thinking about what they've done, and tracking their trajectory. They have paved the way for organizations like us. Whether it's Xero, Laybuy or Vend, there are real amazing Kiwi success stories, I certainly look up to them. I don't see any reason we couldn't have a similar trajectory with the right support and decisions along the way.”
He says Kindo sits around $100 million per year in total purchase value, but the company was a long way off from being anywhere near that in terms of its annual revenue.
Last year it recorded 35% growth and this year is on track to grow again year-on-year by at least 40%.
For now, Maclean says in the past year Kindo has more than doubled the number of schools it has using its platform from the year earlier, and it did the same for the year before that too.
With another 200 or so schools to be added by year’s end, Maclean remains enthused about the future: “I feel like we're just warming up.”