A gaming edtech app for kids to learn and love maths raises NZ$1.5 million pre-Seed

A Kiwi startup that wants to make kids love maths as much as playing Roblox has raised NZ$1.5 million (A$1.35m) in pre-Seed funding.

The round for Polymath was co-led by Blackbird’s NZ office and fellow Aotearoa VC GD1.

The app gamifies maths for kids, underpinned by an algorithm that adapts learning moments to each child’s progress. They have to collect, build, look after the characters and there’s a multiplayer option. It gets them to deal with maths problems along the way – to finish a house, they might need to measure its dimensions, or spot a bad deal shopping.

Tens of thousands of children have already played on Polymath in New Zealand, the US, UK, and Australia.

The funding will help with US market expansion and extend Polymath’s offerings to include collaborative play.

Sophie Silver founded Polymath in June 2021 with her husband Christian. They launched it after Sophie started inventing games to teach the children she worked with as a part-time job while attending university. She was studying human learning and memory, and developmental psychology at UCL and he was getting a degree in computer science at Cambridge, and decided to evolve the games into a learning app.

“Polymath is kid-first. Our mission is to lift global education outcomes and we can’t do that without enthusiasm from children,” Sophie Silver said.

“This isn’t a case of ‘do your homework and you can play Adopt Me on Roblox after’. We’re rebranding learning as exciting and developing a learning algorithm to simultaneously deliver results.”

There a free school version for students, acting as as a gateway to the at-home experience, and it’s proved popular in Australian classrooms

Kids using Polymath play for around 30 minutes on average, and a preliminary analysis of the data data on students who play Polymath regularly and those who don’t, the duo found its users learned as much as 2 times faster.

GD1 co-managing partner Vignesh Kumar said their investment was driven by the clear user obsession the founders had.

“The early progress and insights the team acquired whether it was by advocating in teacher groups on Facebook, or adhoc running polymath sessions and competitions in schools across the country highlighted a clear commitment to not only deeply understanding both sides of the user base but also a desire to move rapidly through the business building phase,” he said.

“This tenacity and strong commitment to drive learnings through understanding the early users was pivotal in enabling us to become early believers.”

Christian Silver, the CTO, said they now working towards a more dynamic world with activities like farming and looking after pets, as well as multiplayer features.

“We’re constantly experimenting with new features in our game world. Trying a new character here, a new way to ask questions there,” he said.

“We’re pushing new ideas out almost daily. The whole team, engineers included, work in person with kids so we get immediate feedback on what’s fun and what’s not.”