The Technology Behind Modern Childcare
Cria is the technology platform we’re building to make childcare simpler — for the providers who run it, and the families who depend on it. Born out of our own experience running childcare centers, Cria connects providers, staff, and parents on a single, purpose-built platform.
Overview
The Problem
Running a childcare center still means juggling spreadsheets, paper waitlists, and endless phone calls — and for parents, finding the right spot often means calling dozens of centers just to ask, “do you have space?” Availability, enrollment, and communication in childcare haven’t kept pace with how the rest of the world operates. Cria was built to close that gap.
One Platform, Built for Everyone Involved
Our team
Provider & staff side
- Waitlist and admissions pipeline management, replacing spreadsheet-based tracking across multiple locations, age groups, and programs.
- Capacity and staff-to-child ratio compliance, reflecting government licensing rules that vary by age group and jurisdiction.
- Billing and payments, including pre-authorized debit (PAD) processing and integration with government childcare subsidy programs (CWELCC).
- Internal communication (“Feed”): a structured update channel between center staff and families, distinguishing operational logs (tied to individual children) from center-wide announcements.
- Attendance and daily operations tracking (check-in/out, incident reporting, staff ratio monitoring).
For Families
- Search and discovery a filterable, location-based search experience for finding licensed childcare that matches a family’s needs (age group, schedule, availability)
- Application and offer management real-time application status, time-sensitive offer windows, and guided decision flows that reduce the friction and delay typically involved in securing a childcare spot
- Enrollment a streamlined digital process replacing paper-based registration, designed to shorten the time between finding a match and completing enrollment
Roadmap
Where We Are
Cria is under continuous, active development as we work toward a full platform release.
- Provider waitlist, admissions pipeline, and location/program/schedule management.
- Parent-facing application dashboard with offer and enrollment tracking.
- Mobile MVP in production use with the company’s own childcare centers, functioning as a live testing and feedback environment.
- Feed: in-app communication system connecting staff, management, and parents.
- Unified design system spanning web and mobile (shared component architecture, design tokens, cross-platform consistency).
- Capacity and scheduling engine (“spot composer”): a differentiating feature that models real-world enrollment patterns (part-time schedules, temporary seats, day-pattern changes) to help providers maximize licensed capacity utilization — a capability not currently offered by existing competitors.
- Migration from the current test-grade mobile MVP to a production-grade, multi-tenant web platform supporting multiple provider organizations, each with isolated data and permissions.
- Parent-facing marketplace search platform, extending the current application flow into a full discovery and comparison experience across providers.
- Mobile v2, focused on high-frequency parent and staff actions (check-in, messaging, quick updates).
- Expanded reporting and analytics for providers.
Our team
About Little Munchkin
Cria is built by Little Munchkin, a childcare operator based in Vancouver. Cria exists because we saw these problems first-hand, running our own centers — and decided to build the solution ourselves, for our own network and, ultimately, for the wider childcare community.