Polymath raises $1.35m to make maths fun and slash screen time

Sophie Silver was working as a nanny when she saw her charges struggling with maths. A business venture, that just raised over $1.3m, was quickly born.

Polymath founders Christian and Sophie Silver have created an education app that they say is more fun than playing Roblox.

A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, while a dollop of good coding can make learning maths more fun.

Sophie Silver was working as a nanny in the UK when she saw her charges struggling with their maths lessons. She told her partner Christian about the problem, and like a scene out of Mary Poppins, an idea quickly came to life.

“He said, ‘Oh, I feel like there is a technical solution here’. So we built an algorithm that makes learning more efficient,” Ms Silver said. The couple have now raised $NZ1.5m ($1.35m) in pre-seed capital from Australia’s biggest venture capital fund, Blackbird Ventures, and Auckland-based GD1 to accelerate the global expansion of their learning app, Polymath.

Their aim is to make learning maths more fun than playing popular computer game Roblox.

Teachers are now using Polymath in the classroom.

“Outside school, kids spend about four to five hours on screens a day, which is a really, really long time, and most of that time is filled with things like gaming and social media and watching videos,” Mr Silver said.

“There’s this growing concern that the time that these kids are spending on these things is not constructive, it’s not enriching. And that’s what we’re trying to give households, in general – an option that kids still want to do, but is way more … wholesome.”

A screenshot of Polymath's app.

Polymath has launched in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, where the Silvers now live, and is being used by teachers in class as well as students at home.

“The average child spends about six minutes a day outside of school on an educational app, so almost nothing,” Mr Silver said.

“Kids who are playing Polymath are spending on average half an hour on it outside of school. So that’s time not spent on things that their parents would rather them not be doing.”

Ms Silver said at the core of Polymath was an algorithm that adapted learning moments to each child’s progress, ensuring their experience was personalised and rewarding. For example, to finish a house, a child might need to measure its dimensions. They might need to spot when they’re getting a bad deal from a shop.

“I was studying psychology at UCL in London, but I was also a part-time nanny. We built an ­algorithm that makes learning more efficient and utilises some of the research that’s in psychology about how the brain works,” she said.

“Kids really need motivation. It needs to be fun for them to continue to do it sustainably. 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.”

Originally published as Polymath raises $1.35m to make maths fun and slash screen time