Sep 16, 2016 01:48 AM EDT By Chirs Brandt, UniversityHerald Reporter

The educational app Remind is celebrating a couple of milestones. First, it has surpassed the 20 million-user mark and second, it has declared Brian Grey as the new CEO. Grey used to be the CEO of the sports media site Bleacher Report.

Remind is an app which allows parents and teachers to communicate easily. More than 50 percent of public schools in America have been using it. Within five years after its launch, Remind has reached 35 million users.

The app owes it popularity to its innovate way of bridging the communication gap between teachers and parents, which often led to missed meeting, unanswered homework, or unread emails. Remind provided a solution for that by creating a safe and secure platform where teachers can send parents reminders regarding upcoming meetings, deadlines to projects, and homework assignments.

Over the years it has added new features to improve its service. Last month, it added Activities, a payment processing system which enables parents to make payments much more easily via Stripe. The feature, which incurs a 5 percent processing fee, has already processed around $1 million payments.

The role of technology in the education industry is expanding. This coming school year, there will be a total of 55 million students entering school and Remind sees the need to ensure that there will no meltdown between the teacher-parent communication.

"Our deep focus and partnership with teachers ensure that we deliver a communication platform that connects every K-12 teacher to their students, parents, and schools," said Grey.

As CEO, Grey aims to leverage that communication and connection among educators, students, and parents in order to make Remind more valuable to the education community. He mapped out the three factors that constitute the go-forward approach of the company, which are "continuing to develop the best representation of the learning graph, making communication as efficient as possible between all parties, and building the services that people in K-12 schools need inside and outside of the classroom."

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit