About Us — Everybody Counts

Our Story

Why We Built Everybody Counts

Andy Ridgway spent three years as a primary school governor at a state school in South London. Every autumn, the same conversation happened: the Year 4 teacher would tell governors that roughly a third of the class had arrived without reliable multiplication fluency from Year 3. The tools available — workbooks, static worksheets, a couple of licensed apps that cost more than the numeracy budget — weren't fixing it.

The frustration wasn't that teachers lacked skill. It was that identifying which students had which specific gap took more time than fixing the gap itself. Teachers were spending Sunday evenings marking paper-based tests to get data they needed on Monday morning.

Everybody Counts started as a side project in 2023 — an adaptive question engine with a teacher dashboard. After a two-term pilot with four South London primaries and a cohort of 340 students, the data was clear enough to go full-time. We're now a team of six, based in London, and funded to keep building.

primary school classroom in South London, pupils working on tablets, teacher wal

Backed By Fuel Ventures

Fuel Ventures invested £800K in Everybody Counts' Pre-Seed Round. Fuel focuses on UK tech companies with early commercial traction — typically £150K–£3M cheque sizes for teams that have already shown product-market fit, not just a deck.

The investment funds product development (adaptive engine improvements, MIS integrations) and our first commercial sales hires.

£800K Pre-Seed · Fuel Ventures

What We Believe

Four things we won't compromise on

Maths ability is not fixed at birth

The research on growth mindset in numeracy is solid — when students are given the right scaffolding and enough attempts, most can achieve fluency. We build for that possibility, not for the idea that some kids are just "not maths people".

Teachers need data, not more marking

The biggest bottleneck in primary maths isn't teaching skill — it's the time it takes to identify which students need what. Every design decision in our dashboard is made to get that information in front of teachers faster, not to add another report to their inbox.

Child data belongs to schools, not to us

We don't use student data for anything except improving that student's learning. No advertising. No selling to third parties. No profiling beyond what's needed to adapt the lesson sequence. This isn't marketing language — it's in the contracts.

It should work on the hardware schools actually have

We test on five-year-old Chromebooks on a throttled 20 Mbps connection every sprint. If it breaks on that device, it doesn't ship. Schools shouldn't need new hardware to use modern software.

About Everybody Counts