EasyA is an educational technology company that connects students with expert maths tutors on-demand, so they can get expert help right when they need it: students simply snap a photo of their question and are matched with an Oxbridge tutor who can help right away!
Without a doubt, the past 3 months have been challenging for everyone. However, while businesses across the country have been hit hard by the unrelenting force of COVID-19, certain industries and companies have benefited. Fortunately, online learning is one of these. Whereas technology and education were previously a combination only favoured by the most technologically-savvy of educators, the past months have turned laggards into early adopters in a shift that will undoubtedly change the future of learning forever.
At EasyA, we have been fortunate to benefit from this shift. Having just launched earlier this year, we have been able to show parents and students the tremendous value of on-demand learning and as a result have seen rapid growth. The pandemic-induced forced school closures and shift of all learning online, combined with forced social distancing measures, have forced parents and students to find new ways of getting academic support to replace what their schools and in-person tutors could traditionally provide. Parents and students who might have previously looked towards online tutoring as a replacement for in-person tutoring with doubt, have found EasyA’s chat-based format extremely effective and convenient.
While our paid service is crucial to operating a sustainable business, we realize that we must also help students who might not be able to pay for our service. As such, we recently launched a pro-bono partnership with St Paul’s and St Paul’s Girls’ Schools in London. As part of the partnership, we will use our innovative technology to connect mentors from these two leading independent schools with mentees from local state schools. Our goal is to facilitate efficient and effective socially-distanced knowledge transfer to help students catch up this summer and hit the ground running next term.
Of course, none of the above would have been possible without the help and resources of the Accelerate Cambridge programme. EasyA is fortunate to be one of the startups currently participating in the programme and we have found it extremely helpful, especially for a company in its early stages. Access to successful entrepreneurs who have launched companies in the past has proved invaluable to the young founders that comprise our team. The Santander Universities Accelerate Project Award and the Santander Internship Grant have also both allowed us to achieve our goals by reaching out to a wider audience, offering discounted memberships to students who need it most and hiring an intern from the university who is currently working with us on exciting new initiatives that we’ll be launching soon!
EasyA’s goal is to make education more accessible to all students across the globe and it is hugely gratifying to see this taking place, with the recent pandemic only serving as a catalyst to many beneficial sectoral tailwinds. We see education as the key to improving equality across the globe and feel that getting students the highest quality support right when they need it most, all from the palms of their hands, is crucial to doing so. Given the unexpected turn that 2020 has taken so far, we’re excited to see what the second half of 2020 holds!
Dominic Kwok
Latest posts by Dominic Kwok (see all)
- Venture Voices: EasyA - 29 July 2020
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