The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
XX century. A school math teacher comes up with 3 versions of a test at home and writes them on the blackboard in the class. Children solve math problems and then hand over their exercise books. A teacher spends half the evening at home on checking.
Estonian #startupoftheday 99math offers a different approach. During a lesson in the web interface of a startup, the teacher selects the topic “adding numbers to a hundred”, receives and dictates to everyone a numeric code. Children enter numbers into their devices and find themselves in the control interface. What is 23 + 48? And 52 + 34?
Nobody’s time is wasted, the tasks are individual, there’s no cheating, it is more fun for schoolchildren to poke at the screen than to write on a piece of paper by hand, everyone is happy. An additional bonus – 99math supports a competitive mode, which announces which of the children won the test. Besides, according to a similar scheme, a startup offers to do homework as well – adjusted for asynchronous mode, everything works exactly the same. There seems to be no monetization yet, everything is free, the project must first become popular, and then it will be the time for money collection.
The service description is very similar to Kahoot, which is already a unicorn. The difference is the focus on mathematics and the automatic generation of problems. In Kahoot, everything works almost identically, a teacher just comes up with questions in advance, and the topic can be absolutely different. That is, the founders of 99math took an existing large project that could be improved and launched their own. Well done, everyone would be so. If they succeed, they will be doubly well done. They have attracted half a million dollars of investments so far.
https://99math.com/
estonia #preseed #education
Translation : Valeria Stupnikova
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
