CENTEGIX, an Atlanta-based maker of school safety and emergency response technology, announced on April 7, 2026, that it had acquired Pikmykid, a Tampa company whose software schools use to run dismissal, hall passes, visitor check-in and the reunification of students with families after an emergency.
The companies did not disclose the price or other terms. The St. Pete Catalyst reported that the deal had closed the month before it was announced.
CENTEGIX said it would start building Pikmykid's features into its cloud-based CENTEGIX Safety Platform straight away, with the aim of giving districts one system for everyday student movement and for emergencies. Pikmykid will keep a presence in Tampa, according to the St. Pete Catalyst.
What Pikmykid built
Founder and chief executive Saravana "Pat" Bhava started Pikmykid more than a decade ago, after he saw the wrong child being led to a car in a school pick-up line, the St. Pete Catalyst reported. The first product helped schools organise afternoon dismissal and turn manual steps for tracking students into a coordinated, secure digital workflow.
The platform later grew to cover visitor management, attendance, digital hall passes, real-time messaging, emergency alerts and reunification. In 2025 Pikmykid bought the visitor management system Visitu. Its customers include public, private and charter schools as well as after-school programmes, camps, preschools and daycare centres.
Bhava told the St. Pete Catalyst the company had been growing 25% to 30% a year, operated in all 50 states and served more than 7,000 schools, which he said was still only about 2% of US schools.
“Pikmykid was built to solve the real, everyday operational challenges schools face—from dismissal and parent communication to student flow and reunification.”
Why CENTEGIX is buying
CENTEGIX is known mainly for hardware, in particular a wearable panic button that lets a teacher call for help and shares their location with responders. In 2023 it bought Ident-A-Kid, a K-12 visitor management company. Its software platform is used to manage layered safety plans and emergency response across a campus.
Pikmykid fills in the routine part of the school day. The combined offer is meant to cover student monitoring through digital hall passes, dismissal, emergency alerts, reunification with approved caregivers, campus-wide visibility and coordination between staff and families.
Brent Cobb, CEO of CENTEGIX, said school safety is built into every moment of the day rather than starting in an emergency, and that schools would be able to manage student safety from arrival to dismissal on one platform. Tony Lake, superintendent of Lindbergh Schools in St. Louis, Missouri, said his district had used both products and that combining them linked daily operations with emergency response in a way that had not existed before.
The founder and the funding
Pikmykid did not disclose its revenue or headcount. In May 2021 the growth equity firm Growth Street Partners made a minority investment in the company, then described as a K-12 dismissal management software platform with more than one million users; the amount was not disclosed.
Bhava told the St. Pete Catalyst that Pikmykid had weighed raising a large amount of new capital against finding a partner, and that CENTEGIX's market share was a factor in choosing a sale. He said the two companies target the same market and the same type of customer without their products overlapping, and that Pikmykid was conceived, built and grown in the Tampa Bay area with help from local entrepreneurship groups.
What happens to schools
CENTEGIX said it would focus on giving existing customers a smooth experience during the integration. Its website now tells visitors that Pikmykid is part of CENTEGIX and that the company offers one platform for daily school operations and emergency response.
Bhava said Pikmykid would now be part of a larger organisation with more people on the ground to reach more schools. He said joining CENTEGIX would let the company build on its original work by connecting daily operations with emergency response, which he said should lead to faster decisions and better coordination for schools and their communities.
