We’re building tools for the crèches no one builds for.
Kreshe is the operating system for South African crèches. It’s made by Kopanong Platforms (Pty) Ltd, a Free State company, shaped by the day-to-day of running a crèche.
Where this began
Kopanong is the Sesotho word for a place of gathering.
Kopanong Learning Project, the non-profit side of what we do, was running tutoring out of Itumeleng Crèche in Frankfort. That’s how I met the principal. Our tutors needed a home. She opened her gates.
I told her I could build something for the crèche. She didn’t say yes immediately. What she did was sit me down with her notebooks and walk me through them.
There were paper trails for everything. Attendance kept by hand, every morning. Children disappearing for weeks at a time. Sometimes pulled out of the crèche without a word, walking away with months of unpaid fees because there was no system that flagged it. Departmental submissions where half the supporting documents were missing or out of date, because no one had time to keep them current while running the day.
What stayed with me was the scale of it. Over 42,000 crèches in this country, most of them run the same way: on paper, by principals carrying every administrative load on their own. Imported software was never going to fit. Whatever fixed this had to be built here, by people who knew the ground.
Kreshe is what closes that gap: a South African platform, built in the country, priced in rand, registered with the Information Regulator, multilingual by design, and shaped by the principals it’s for.
“Built for every principal who runs the same day, in the same country, on the same paper.”
Why crèches
The most important infrastructure in South Africa is also the least supported.
Early childhood development is the place where a country’s future is either built or quietly given up on. Crèches keep working parents in the workforce. They make it possible for single mothers to take a shift. They’re where children first learn to share, count, and be known by their name.
And yet, of every category of small business in South Africa, the ECD operator is the one most likely to be running on paper. Not because the principals are behind. They’re some of the sharpest small-business operators we’ve met. The software market priced them out, then forgot they existed.
What we’re building
One platform. Every role.
Kreshe is the principal’s admin app, the practitioner’s class register, the parent’s daily updates and fees, the transporter’s route, and the kiosk at the gate. One account. One bill. The crèche’s own brand on the front of it.
See how it worksAdd and manage parents and children, each with a digital file.
Rotating 5-digit PIN codes tapped at a single gate kiosk.
Toggle who paid, payment history, invoices, fee tiers.
Individual, class, or broadcast.
Manage practitioners, set classroom capacities, assign children.
Driver routes with one-tap call and open-in-maps. PDF history exports.
Who
A small team, a long horizon.
Kopanong Platforms (Pty) Ltd is solely owned by founder Nkululeko Nhlapo. Early field research was supported on a community basis by Teboho Modibedi and Kagiso Motaung. The product was first deployed at Itumeleng Crèche in Frankfort, our first customer. We’re hiring slowly, on purpose. The crèches we serve don’t need a venture-backed platform. They need a tool that’s here in five years, on the same terms.
- Registered as
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Kopanong Platforms (Pty) Ltd
CIPC 2026/334638/07 - POPIA
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Information Regulator
Reg. 2026-010867 - We serve
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Crèches in all nine provinces
of South Africa - Founded in
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The Free State, 2026
Registered office in Villiers
Where we’re going
The same platform. Every crèche’s name on it.
Kreshe is white-labelled by design. Every crèche on the platform gets its own subdomain, its own theme, its own logo on parent statements and reminders. The parents see the crèche, not us. That’s the right way for an ECD platform to live: in the background, doing the work, while the brand the family trusts stays in front.
Kreshe is a national platform from day one. Onboarding, training, and support all run remotely, over WhatsApp, email, and screen-share. That’s how principals actually want to be supported, regardless of where their centre is. From Cape Town to Polokwane to Mthatha, the experience is the same.
And we’re heading where the platform is most needed: the township, peri-urban, and rural centres that the global SaaS catalogue treats as out of scope. The pricing is built for that. The compliance is built for that. The product is built for that.
Founding partners
Be part of our founding 25.
Twelve months at a fixed price, working alongside the team that’s building it. We’re capping the cohort at 25 so we can stay close to every crèche.