Challenge

Childcare, preschools, and other early education programmes are under tremendous pressure. Their operators must manage complex business operations, exceed parents' high expectations, and meet compliance mandates – all while ensuring teachers have time to nurture the children in their care.

Brightwheel was founded in San Francisco in 2014 to help solve these pain points for schools and families. The software was initially focused on helping childcare and preschool programmes digitise classroom management – moving from pen and paper to digitally capturing attendance and facilitating parent communications through a mobile app. Brightwheel soon recognised the huge amount of additional administrative work involved in running a childcare and preschool business, particularly related to managing cash flow and financial operations. Many childcare businesses operate on slim margins, and both payment collection issues and delayed settlements can jeopardise their ability to meet major financial obligations such as rent and payroll.

To ease those challenges, the company quickly built enhanced features to help providers simplify billing, collect tuition payments faster, and gain better visibility into cash flow. "We provide that entire suite of tools to solve our customers' needs and get them paid on time, so they can focus on what is most important to them: delivering the highest quality care and developing the next generation," said Filip Nuytemans, vice president of new initiatives at brightwheel.

To build this suite of tools, brightwheel knew it needed a sophisticated payments infrastructure to support expansion into international markets and to continue adding features that help childcare and preschool providers manage the financial side of the business.

Because many childcare and preschool programmes were digitising their operations for the first time, brightwheel needed to make its onboarding process very simple. However, that process also had to support vastly different and complicated compliance and identity verification requirements for different types of schools. Additionally, the company wanted to give parents the ability to reliably pay online with their preferred payment methods, while helping childcare and preschool programmes prevent fraud as they began accepting tuition through this new channel.

Solution

Brightwheel built its payments infrastructure on Stripe, tapping into Stripe's expansive suite of financial solutions that enable vertical SaaS platforms to expand their value proposition and support scaling growth. With Stripe, brightwheel created multiple revenue streams, generating a consistent source of cash flow that the company could invest in research and development, innovation, and the growth of the platform.

Brightwheel first launched with Stripe Billing to collect subscription fees from its childcare and preschool providers. Building on that recurring SaaS revenue, brightwheel created an embedded payments solution using Stripe Connect, which meant providers could begin collecting families' tuition payments online. To help further improve programmes' cash flow, brightwheel enabled next-day payouts through Connect. The company also used Connect's automated 1099-K tax reporting to take the time-consuming task of filing taxes off childcare and preschool providers' plates. With Connect's ability to support merchant onboarding, plus payments and payouts in more than 46 countries, brightwheel quickly moved into Canada without having to build a separate payments infrastructure for each new country as it expanded.

In 2025, brightwheel used Stripe embedded components for onboarding to automatically manage various levels of compliance for different types of organisations. For example, using Stripe logic to automatically request a different series of compliance-related information from a private school rather than for a public school enables childcare and preschool providers to complete onboarding faster – while ensuring brightwheel receives all required compliance information. Brightwheel also used Stripe Identity in its onboarding, which programmatically confirms the identity of new childcare and preschool providers to mitigate merchant-side fraud.

By bundling Connect with Stripe Payments, brightwheel could offer its childcare and preschool programmes a range of payment methods as the platform grew, making it easier for families to pay their tuition bills. To support customers' preferences, brightwheel decided to offer credit cards, ACH transactions, and ACSS debits in Canada – and can now turn on additional payments as needed.

Results

Brightwheel grows to category leader with Stripe

Since working with Stripe, brightwheel has grown from a startup to a leader in the childcare management software category. Using the global coverage of Connect, brightwheel's subscription and payments offering now supports millions of students, families, and schools in the US and Canada.

"Our partnership with Stripe brings us flexibility, innovation, and speed," said Nuytemans. "With payments covered by Stripe, we can focus our engineers on solving new challenges for our customers, improving our product and driving growth."

Up to 85% faster onboarding

Using Connect embedded components and Identity have expedited the childcare and preschool provider onboarding process from up to a week during its peak season, to only a day. The solutions also supported the differing and complex compliance requirements of brightwheel's diverse customer base, ensuring that childcare and preschool providers can begin collecting online tuition payments quickly.

"Our schools never see that complexity, because all of the compliance logic happens in the back end with Stripe. We can give customers a seamless experience – turning a headache of a problem and a process into a really simple tool for our customers to quickly get started with brightwheel," said Nuytemans.

Next-day deposits boost childcare providers' cash flow

By offering next-day deposits, brightwheel has helped customers improve their cash flow and ensure their financial obligations are met. With Stripe's best-in-class infrastructure, tuition payments are now easily processed and routed across banks and networks to childcare and preschool providers, making the process effortless for both parents and schools.

"Our customers rely on us to reliably collect tuition payments from parents. Receiving those payments on time and without issue is hugely important for our schools," said Nuytemans. "With Stripe, the payments are right, accurate, and reliable, so we can get our customers paid faster and always provide great service."