The Australian EdTech That Graduated to the Global Stage
Tes Seqta Founders Grant and Sharon Grosser
SEQTA Software | Consensus Award Winner 2013
It started around a kitchen table in Western Australia.
Two teachers, Grant and Sharon Grosser, had spent years inside classrooms and understood something many software developers didn't:
Teachers weren't short of information.
They were drowning in systems that didn't talk to each other.
Grant, then a deputy principal, had begun developing small pieces of software to help manage the administrative problems he encountered at school. Eventually, he became convinced there was a better way.
So in 2006, Grant and Sharon took the considerably riskier option.
They decided to build it themselves.
From the Classroom to a Software Company
SEQTA was designed as an integrated platform connecting the different parts of school life — teaching, learning, attendance, pastoral care, reporting, students and parents.
But getting it off the ground wasn't easy.
The founders initially extended the mortgage on their home to raise $70,000 for development, followed by another $250,000 from friends and family.
Then came 2013.
SEQTA secured a major agreement with the Catholic Education Office in Western Australia to roll its software out across 120 primary schools, followed by a contract with Adventist Schools Australia.
That same year, SEQTA Suite was recognised with a Consensus Award.
It was becoming clear that two teachers from Perth hadn't simply created a useful piece of school software.
They had created the foundations of a serious EdTech company.
Then the Growth Accelerated
SEQTA went on to raise nearly $10 million in equity funding.
Revenue grew at a compound rate of more than 70% over four years, while its workforce expanded from just eight employees to around 75.
In January 2017, SEQTA joined with Synergetic Management Systems under the newly created Education Horizons Group, bringing together teaching, learning and school administration technology to create what was described at the time as Australia's largest wholly Australian-owned K–12 school software business.
But the story didn't stop there.
Education Horizons expanded internationally and by 2020 was serving more than 1,900 schools and one million users across more than 60 countries. SEQTA remained one of the group's core products.
Then, in 2025, Education Horizons was acquired by global education company Tes.
And remarkably, the name on the product survived the entire journey.
SEQTA is still SEQTA.
Today, Tes continues to offer the platform to schools, while the wider Education Horizons business brought technology serving millions of users across dozens of countries into the Tes group.
The People Who Understand the Problem Often Build the Best Solution
There's an important founder lesson buried in SEQTA's journey.
Grant and Sharon Grosser weren't outsiders who looked at education and decided it was an attractive market.
They were teachers.
They had lived the problem.
They knew where teachers were wasting time because they had wasted that time themselves.
And they were prepared to put their own home on the line to build something better.
The company that began around their kitchen table ultimately became part of an international education technology group.
For founders sitting with an idea that solves a problem they know intimately, SEQTA's story is a reminder that industry experience can be an extraordinary competitive advantage.
Sometimes the person best positioned to disrupt an industry is the person frustrated enough by working inside it.