We closed a £800,000 Pre-Seed round last month, led by Fuel Ventures. I've been sitting on this news while the paperwork finalised, which meant telling roughly forty people via WhatsApp but not being able to say anything publicly. That phase is over.
This post covers what the funding is for, how we got here, and what the next twelve months look like. It's not a press release. It's an honest account of where we are as a business.
Why Fuel Ventures
Fuel Ventures backs early-stage UK tech companies — their typical cheque is between £150K and £3M, which put us squarely in the middle of their sweet spot. More importantly, Mark Pearce and the team have invested in ed-tech before and didn't flinch when I said "primary schools" and "UK curriculum." Some investors hear that and immediately start asking about the US market. Fuel asked about Year 3 attainment data.
We ran a proper process — six investor conversations in total, three of which went to due diligence. Fuel was the right partner not just on terms but on how they think about the product. They want to understand what teachers actually do in the first ten minutes of a lesson. That's the conversation I want to be having.
What We Had When We Raised
The honest answer: a working product and a small but real revenue base. At the time of signing, we had fourteen schools on paid contracts and four independent tutors on monthly plans. That's not a lot of schools. It is enough to say the product works and that the people using it are paying for it rather than accepting it as a favour.
The pilot data mattered more than the revenue number. Two of our schools ran the platform for two full terms across Years 3 and 4. The headline: 87% of participating students improved their times-table fluency scores against the same period the previous year. Crucially, that number came from a cohort that included students on SEND plans — which is where a lot of ed-tech products quietly underperform.
What the £800K Pays For
Three things, in priority order:
1. The product team. Right now the platform is being maintained by two engineers. One of them is also doing customer support, which is not a sustainable situation. The first hire is a senior full-stack developer who already has experience shipping to schools. We'll follow that with a part-time QA contractor. The target is a team of four by Q3.
2. Curriculum content. We currently have full coverage of Years 1 to 4 of the UK National Curriculum for maths. Years 5 and 6 are partially mapped — about 60% coverage — with some gaps around statistics and geometry. Getting to complete Year 1–6 coverage is the single most important product milestone we have this year. We're bringing in two curriculum consultants who've worked with Pearson and Oxford University Press to close those gaps properly.
3. Sales infrastructure. Our growth so far has been almost entirely word-of-mouth between maths leads and school governors. That's gratifying but not a sales strategy. We're building a small outbound team: one dedicated schools sales person and one person managing relationships with multi-academy trusts (MATs). MATs are the distribution channel that changes the growth curve — one contract can mean 8 to 25 schools onboarded together.
What We're Not Spending It On
A few things I was asked about during fundraising that we're explicitly not doing yet:
We're not building a parent-facing app. Every investor asked. The answer is that schools actively don't want homework to become a platform feature — it creates inequality between families, generates parent support tickets, and dilutes the product focus. If a parent-facing product makes sense, it's a separate product built on top of the existing platform, not a feature we bolt on now.
We're not expanding to the US or Middle East. Several conversations went this direction. The UK National Curriculum is specific enough that any meaningful expansion requires localising the entire content library. That's a 12–18 month project. We'll do it eventually. Not this year.
We're not hiring a marketing manager. Everything we've sold so far has come through direct relationships. The money goes to product and sales first. Content marketing — which is what this blog post is — costs time and effort but not headcount at this stage.
The Twelve-Month Plan
By March 2026, we're targeting 80 schools on the platform. That's an increase from 14 to 80 in one year. It's aggressive. The logic behind it: we know MATs are the unlock, and we have two MAT relationships that are already warm. One MAT conversation could move us from 14 schools to 30 in a single contract. We're not banking on it, but it's structurally possible in a way it wasn't six months ago.
We also expect to close a Seed round in Q1 2026. We'll need to hit the 80-school mark, or be very close to it, to do that at a valuation that makes sense. The Pre-Seed gives us the runway to get there — the current burn means we have just over 20 months of runway at projected spend.
A Word on the Market
UK primary schools are not an easy customer. Procurement is slow. Budgets are thin — the average primary school maths budget sits between £2,000 and £5,000 per year for software tools, and we compete with free resources from the BBC, Oak National Academy, and publisher-provided materials. Decision-making involves teachers, maths leads, headteachers, and sometimes governors. None of that is lost on us.
The argument for this market anyway is that the problem is genuinely serious. The UK's most recent PISA results placed English Year 4 students 12 places below their 2019 ranking in maths. Post-pandemic numeracy gaps are documented and persistent. Schools want solutions that work and don't require a trained technician to operate. That's what we're building.
What's Next
The next post on this blog will be about the pilot data in detail — methodology, what we measured, the findings we're proud of, and the findings that sent us back to the drawing board. I think it's more useful than another fundraising announcement.
If you're a school or MAT and want to run a trial this term, contact us at andy@everybodycounts.co. We're doing structured trials, not free-for-alls — there's a setup call, a two-week check-in, and a proper review at the end. The trial is free. The expectation is that you'll give us honest feedback even when it stings.