Paperly Raises $3M to Build Australia’s Most Comprehensive K–12 School Administration Platform

Australian edtech company Paperly has raised $3 million in a new funding round led by Tribe Global Ventures, with participation from Purpose Ventures and Skalata. The investment will accelerate the company’s mission to streamline the administrative workflows that underpin every Australian school’s excursions, assessments, sports, music lessons, risk management, parent–teacher interviews and the extensive documentation that supports daily school operations.

With over 250 schools already contracted for 2026, Paperly is emerging as one of the fastest-growing operational platforms in Australian education, offering a unified system designed specifically to simplify the complex, highly manual workload of school administration.

Solving One of Education’s Most Persistent Problems: Administrative Overload

Australian schools face a significant and growing administrative burden, especially around extracurricular activities and non-academic workflows that often sit outside their core learning management systems. Staff routinely navigate hundreds of forms, scattered spreadsheets, email threads and outdated processes just to manage weekly activities.

This administrative complexity introduces inefficiency, increases stress for teachers & staff and creates a fragmented experience for students and parents. Despite the acceleration of digital tools in education, many schools continue to rely on manual processes for operational tasks that could be automated. Paperly aims to solve this by providing a modular, end-to-end platform that simplifies and consolidates these workflows.

A Modular Platform Built for Real School Workflows

Paperly’s platform consists of a suite of online modules that handle the full spectrum of extracurricular and operational school activities. These include:

• Excursion and school trip management
• Risk assessment and compliance workflows
• Sports scheduling and team management
• Music lesson planning and communication
• Assessment calendars
• Parent–teacher interview scheduling
• Digital forms for hundreds of daily tasks

Each module is designed to integrate seamlessly with existing school systems, creating a consistent workflow for administrators, teachers, students and parents.

This modularity is one of Paperly’s strengths. Schools can adopt the full platform or begin with a specific operational pain point, such as excursions or sports and gradually expand over time.

Built in Collaboration With Schools, for Schools

According to Paperly, the platform is shaped by close collaboration with educators, operational staff and school leadership teams. This ensures that its tools match the real-world needs of primary and secondary schools across Australia. Each module reflects the complexities of school operations, including:

• Approvals involving multiple stakeholders
• Parent consent workflows
• Child safety and risk compliance
• Scheduling across staff and year groups
• Communication requirements
• Integration with existing school systems

By designing its modules with school users at the centre, Paperly reduces the friction that often prevents adoption of new technology in education.

The Growing Demand for Digitised School Operations

Australian education has seen significant digital growth in recent years, particularly in curriculum delivery and student communication. Yet the operational backbone of schools has remained largely underserved. Extracurricular management is one of the most complex, time-intensive parts of school life.

Excursions alone can involve dozens of forms, multiple rounds of approvals, risk assessments, transport bookings, permissions, medical data, staff coordination, legal requirements and parent communication.

This is mirrored across sports, music, co-curricular programs and administrative tasks. Paperly’s platform is built to address these overlooked, yet critical, workflows where digital transformation has lagged the most.

Backed by Strong Investors to Scale Nationally

The $3 million funding round signals strong investor confidence in Paperly’s position as a transformative force in school administration.

“Paperly is solving a problem that every Australian school experiences daily,” Tribe Global Ventures noted in the funding announcement. “Their growth and adoption demonstrate how urgently schools need better tools to manage operational workflows.”

Purpose Ventures and Skalata’s participation reflects broader momentum in Australia’s edtech sector, where solutions that simplify staff workload and reduce administrative overhead have become a priority. Paperly plans to use the funding to expand its product capabilities, enhance integrations and support its growing partner ecosystem.

More Than a Platform: A New Operational Standard for Schools

Paperly frames its long-term vision as building the most comprehensive operational platform for Australian schools, a digital backbone that consolidates administrative workflows into a single, easy-to-use system. The company highlights that streamlining extracurricular and operational tasks can deliver significant benefits:

• Reduced workload for teachers and admin teams
• More accurate and consistent processes
• Better compliance and risk management
• Better parent engagement
• Higher student participation and organisation
• Less time spent chasing forms, emails and signatures

With 250 schools already committed for 2026, Paperly is positioning itself not just as a software provider but as a key infrastructure partner for education.

Paperly’s growth reflects a long-ignored reality in education: school operations are complex, high-volume and often reliant on manual workflows that should have been digitised years ago. By focusing specifically on extracurricular and administrative tasks and building modular tools that integrate directly into existing processes, Paperly is solving the practical side of school life that most edtech platforms overlook.

The challenge ahead will be scaling these modules across diverse school environments while maintaining simplicity and reliability. If Paperly succeeds, it could emerge as one of Australia’s most important operational platforms in K–12 education.