We love how Monisha Sami’s biggest idea began. Not with a business plan, a grant application or an ache in the heart. With a children’s book about an Australian Shepherd named Kai going on an adventure in a yellow submarine.

Kai would make new friends, face a challenge, discover something exciting, and learn to care for the environment along the way. It was a simple, joyful idea. But as Monisha sat with it, she started to see what the stories could carry: kindness, safety, inclusion, problem-solving, the gentle architecture of a whole world children could explore.

That one idea grew into Storyland. Thirty-six characters. A universe of stories. And eventually, StoryCloud, an early years learning app she now leads as Founder and CEO alongside her day job as a criminologist.

Monisha describes herself as warm, curious, creative, and a little bit intense when she cares about something. Spend time with her and that last part becomes obvious quickly. She puts chilli on almost everything and microwaves her food until it’s hotter than the sun. She watches K-dramas to unwind, specifically crime thrillers and dystopian fantasy, which she admits probably says something about the way her brain likes to rest. She is close with her sisters in the way that makes everything feel easy and familiar.

She is also someone who has spent a long time noticing things.

Growing up, Monisha didn’t always have the words for what she was observing: inequity, feeling between worlds, the quiet understanding that some children seemed to have more support around them than others. Those early observations didn’t resolve neatly. But they stayed with her. Over time, they became the engine behind everything she has built.

The difficult parts can still become part of something meaningful,” she says, “especially when they help you understand what matters to you, what you want to protect, and what kind of change you want to help build.”

The problem at the centre of StoryCloud’s work is not a new one. Monisha is the first to say so.

The term “digital divide” has been in circulation since the 1990s, when educators began warning that some children were being prepared for the information age while others were being quietly left behind. More than thirty years later, that warning still holds. The gap has shifted shape, but it has not closed.

“That history matters,” she says, “because it shows this isn’t a new problem, even though it keeps showing up in new ways.”

In early childhood education, the divide becomes very practical and very visible. A child missing out on safe and structured digital learning. A centre without the support to manage digital safety well. Families left out because the system wasn’t designed with them in mind.

StoryCloud is Monisha’s attempt to build something that meets that reality directly. Not more screen time for its own sake, but safe, affordable, accessible early learning infrastructure that helps childcare centres, educators, children, and families narrow that gap in ways that actually work. Measured screen time, values-led content, and the right support structures around the people doing the caring.

For Monisha, the criminologist and the founder are not two people doing two separate jobs. Both are interested in the conditions that help people feel supported and the barriers that quietly make things harder for some than others. Prevention runs through everything she does, whether that means understanding what leads someone toward harm or what a child needs in their earliest years to have a fair start.

One of the things that has meant the most to her in building StoryCloud has had nothing to do with strategy or product milestones.

It has been watching the culture take shape. Seeing the kind of people the mission attracts. Watching them bring their own care, creativity, and passion into something she once only imagined.

There have been lots of tears,” she says, “sometimes from stress and overwhelm, but it is such a special feeling to see something you once imagined being carried and shaped by people who love it and believe in it too.”

That is the part that stays with you in Monisha’s story: not the platform, not the thirty-six characters, the time spent building quietly. It is the fact that Kai the Australian Shepherd was the beginning of a question she is still answering.

What would it look like if every child had the stories, the safety, and the support they needed to find their way?

She is still building the answer. And she is not building it alone.

Learn more about Monisha and StoryCloud at storycloud.com.au