Husband and wife cofounders Christian and Sophie Silver: "Our goal is to be the household name for screen time that parents can feel good about."
An Auckland start-up has just staged a successful pre-seed funding round for its education app, which is used in half of New Zealand schools.
Kiwi couple Christian and Sophie Silver were on their OE in England when inspiration struck.
“I was studying psychology at UCL [University College London], human learning and memory and developmental psychology specifically,” Sophie says.
“And my part-time job was being a nanny, which was awesome. I didn’t have to do barista work or bartending; I got to work with kids. But what I realised simultaneously is the kids hated maths. So I’d have to invent games to try and motivate them to do their homework. That was the catalyst.
“But the way we’re teaching kids maths just doesn’t align with the way the brain works, and I found it really frustrating.
“So I’d come home and complain a lot to Christian. And Christian, being a software engineer, was like: ‘We can make an algorithm to fix that’, which was a lovely idea. And we were both very excited.
“But obviously you can’t just put an algorithm in front of a child. That’s not how it works. And then we started Polymath.”
The question was, “How do we wrap up all this evidence that we’re finding in learning and psychology and put it into an app that kids actually really want to play?” Sophie Silver says.
At the time – 2018 – Christian was doing a computer science degree at Cambridge (where he co-founded Hackers at Cambridge).
“This was pre-Covid. We looked a bit deeper and found this bizarre, frightening global phenomenon of the average mass ability decreasing in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development],” Christian says. He uses OECD figures to back up his case.
“And it wasn’t a couple of kids struggling. It’s global and it’s getting worse. And, of course, the pandemic has perpetuated the issue. How can we turn the tides of maths literacy dropping basically everywhere?”
Christian Silver quotes research which found that despite spending more than four hours a day on screens outside of school, kids spend only six minutes on average on educational apps. Instead, they spend time gaming, watching videos, and using social media.
After graduating, the couple took corporate day jobs in London (Sophie as a project manager at Worldpay, Christian a software engineer at Citadel) as they worked on the app that would “gamefy” maths in a Minecraft-like cuboid world.
The aim was to “make maths as fun as Roblox”, Sophie Silver says, namechecking a gaming platform that’s wildly popular with kids.
The long-time couple – who met while at Kristin School on Auckland’s North Shore – returned home and released Polymath in January 2023.
They say it’s now clocked more than 20,000 downloads, including teachers at 50% of NZ primary schools. It helps that the game is free, so there’s no approval paperwork to chew through to find (down the track, there are plans to charge for “avatar assets”). There’s been uptake in the United States, Britain and Australia too.
The Silvers now work on Polymath full-time and have hired two software developers.
Further expansion will be funded by a recently closed $1.5 million “pre-seed” round.
“Pre-seed” is the pocket-money phase of the venture capital cycle, which also includes seed and Series A, B, C and later rounds, all snowballing into tens or hundreds of millions of dollars before an IPO or trade sale, if all goes well.
But in Polymath’s case, it was significant because it drew the biggest name in Australasian venture capital: Blackbird Ventures (a key backer of Canva, Halter and Partly, among many others), which co-led the raise with NZ’s Global From Day One (GD1), with support from Phase One Ventures and Startmate. If things stay on course, having a heavy-hitter like Blackbird on your share register bodes well for further raises.
“Watching Christian and Sophie work I was struck by their ability to iterate quickly on their product, listen closely to their users for feedback, and build a game with strikingly long session times given it involved maths,” Blackbird general partner Phoebe Harrop said.
“This is a scrappy team who are delivering a product that kids love, and parents love that their kids love.”
Although it trades as Polymath, the Silvers actually registered their company as Celadon AI. That was in mid-2021, some 18 months before ChatGPT’s release and the generative AI megahype that ensued.
“What we have in the app right now is an inhouse-built learning algorithm,” Sophie says.
“It’s adaptive and it allows for a personalisation of learning so kids get the right questions that are tailored to them at the right time.”
Anything close to an algorithm is enough for software to be marketed as “AI” these days, but the Silvers are not bandwagon jumpers.
“The current generation of AI – LLMs [large language models] and stuff is really powerful,” Christian says.
“When we find a problem that can be solved with AI, like creating a curriculum, we’ll use it.
“But the way we see it is that it’s mostly solving the wrong problem.
“The thing that makes learning hard is motivation and keeping kids on-task, and AI doesn’t help with that.”
While their $1.5m seed raise is small potatoes, the Silvers are following in some big footsteps.
New Zealand has produced a clutch of edu-tech software global success stories, including Auckland-based Kami (sold to an American private equity firm last year in a deal that valued it at about $300m) and Dunedin’s Education Perfect (where US KKR took control in 2021 in a deal that valued the start-up at $455m).
“Our goal is to be the household name for screen time that parents can feel good about, giving any child in the world an educational app that they actually want to use,” Sophie says. “So our ambitions are really large. In 10 years’ time, we want to be seeing global maths attainment rates lifting.”
The Silvers can already roll out hero quotes from teachers, including Claire Cheeseman, who teaches in Laingholm, Auckland, who says “[Polymath is] probably the best website find this year [2024]. We are a year three and four class and they love chasing records - trying to beat their accuracy and correct answers. As a teacher, I love that I can set an option for my class to work independently.”
Notwithstanding teachers’ classroom enthusiasm, one of the Silvers’ key goals is to encourage learning outside the classroom. They say kids spend an average of half an hour on Polymath, with those who play in teams progressing twice as fast in a virtual “sandbox” where they play with thousands of others.
How does the still pre-revenue Polymath plan to monetise its product?
“It’s something we’ll explore later,” Sophie says.
It could be that parents will buy in-game digital currency, used to buy digital assets like fancier avatars. If you’re not familiar with gaming, this has proved a sustainable business model for many including West Auckland’s Grinding Gear Games, which brings in more than $100m each year selling digital trinkets and character upgrades to players of its Path of Exile franchise.
“Digital currencies in games are the new pocket money,” Sophie says.
“Think Fortnite or Roblox or even Minecraft, with parents often preferring these to buying more toys that clutter the house.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
OPINION: The cost of doubling down.