Securly
Providing a Birds’s-Eye View of Student Screen Time

Technology today is playing a role of a trailblazer as it is opening new windows of opportunities for the education sector. Vinay Mahadik, Co-Founder and CEO of Securly—a cloud-based solution provider for K-12 schools—can’t agree more. “The EdTech field is manifesting an exponential shift where the schools are moving beyond the tradition of using textbooks to more effective Chromebooks and iPads,” says Mahadik. However, this trend of using smart devices for studies has raised few concerns and questions too, inhibiting its omnipresence.

“Parents and the school faculty want to ensure that the mobile devices handed over to children should be used productively, and should not, in any way, impede the academic performance of the children,” explains Mahadik. Securly addresses this pain point by looking past the web-filtering options—simply blocking adult websites or keywords— and focusing extensively on what students are searching on Google, Bing or Yahoo. Securly also monitors the sentiments behind posts or comments youngsters make or receive on social platforms to detect the threat of bullying or self-harm.

Our dashboard provides schools and parents with a bird’s-eye view of how productive kids are on the internet and alerts them of any roadblock

The company does this through its Sentiment Analysis Engine that further bolsters Securly’s mission to make the internet safe for young generation. Securly’s Sentiment Analysis technology is the first to rely on natural language processing algorithms to determine the sentiment of a student’s online posts. “We bring in the technologies and dashboards that could provide schools and parents with a bird’s eye view of how productive kids are on the internet and alerts them of any roadblock,” says Mahadik. Parents can simply sign up on the company’s website to begin seeing reports of their kids’ activities.

Santa Carla, CA headquartered Securly is a destination where stimulating ideas comes to life. Epitomizing innovation, their platform performs granular inspection and reporting that was attributed to only on-premise appliances before. Their ability to parse what kids are posting on social media and alarm parents and school staff accordingly is unparalleled. “For fortifying their sentiment analysis engine, Securly has partnered with Professor Yi Zhang from UC-Santa Cruz for mitigating the risks associated with bullying on the social media platforms,” notes Mahadik. Professor Yi Zhang is the recipient of various acknowledgements such as Google Research Award and Microsoft Research Award.

Built on the bedrock of Domain Name System (DNS), Securly’s platform works seamlessly across all devices. Developed primarily for K-12 school, the company has already set a vibrant roadshow of acclamation and conviction from the authorities and parents. “With our clear positioning, we are seeing 85 percent inbound leads and our second year of operations has already crossed 1 percent market share among U.S. schools,” says Mahadik.

The B2B traction Securly has engineered is paving a viable distribution channel for company’s parental product. “Every district that we sign up provide us the ability to reach out to thousands or tens of thousands of parents and give their kids a best surfing experience over the Internet,” claims Mahadik. “In this line, we have already built our in-school and take-home products for enabling students to leverage internet in the most efficient way.” The forthcoming product of Securly is a plug and play network device. It will essentially take over the home network to allow kids to pick up any iPad or laptop in the house and find Securly managing and securing it.