Education · 2025
Trunkie
An AI-native school operating system launched with more than fifty modules, built to earn a place in a teacher's day.
Timeline
16 weeks to first launch
Team
25+ engineers, 1 product manager, 2 devops
Services
The situation
Schools were running on a patchwork of spreadsheets, messaging groups, and a different login for every task. Nothing talked to anything else, every report was assembled by hand, and the people who needed the data the most, teachers and heads, had the least time to chase it.
Trunkie wanted to replace all of it with a single school operating system, more than fifty modules covering everything from attendance to fees to lesson planning. The feature count was the easy part. The real risk was building something a tired teacher would still open on a Monday morning without resenting it.
A few choices that mattered.
The decisions that shaped the build, and why we made them.
We built around the school day, not the org chart
Instead of modelling departments, we modelled the moments a teacher, student, or parent lives through, so every screen mapped to something real in their day.
One spine, fifty modules
We designed a shared data and permission core first, so the modules behaved like one product instead of fifty small apps stitched together.
AI only where it removed work
We added intelligence to the tedious parts, like drafting reports and summarising performance, and left the rest alone. The goal was always fewer clicks for busy people.
Roles before features
Students, teachers, parents, administrators, management, and support staff each got a view shaped for them, so nobody waded through controls that were never theirs.
What Zeto owned.
The parts of this engagement that were ours end to end, not handed off between vendors.
- The early research and the conversations with the people who would use it
- Product strategy across the platform and its fifty-plus modules
- UI/UX design for all six roles, from students to management
- The shared data and permission core underneath every module
- Web and AI engineering across the full build
- The foundations that carry 100k+ daily users at term time
What went into production.
- A unified school operating system with more than fifty modules on one platform
- Tailored experiences for students, teachers, parents, and administrators
- AI-assisted reporting and summaries that cut hours of manual admin
- A shared permission and data core that keeps every module consistent
- Foundations that hold up at term time when everyone logs in at once
What it added up to.
Sixteen weeks from kickoff to first launch, with more than fifty modules live on one platform.
modules launched
roles served end to end
daily active users
platform replacing many
In plain words
Trunkie launched with over fifty modules live and one platform replacing the spreadsheet sprawl that came before. More importantly, teachers used it, because it fit the day they really have rather than the one an org chart imagines.
The platform now serves more than 100,000 daily active users without strain, and the shared core means new modules ship quickly instead of starting from scratch each time.
Zeto took ownership end to end: the research, the conversations with the people who would actually use it, and the build itself. It felt less like hiring a studio and more like gaining a founding team.
Let's build something that compounds.
Bring your objective and your constraints. We will come back with a focused execution path, and we stay accountable to the outcome.