Meet the Math tutor who bagged $4m funding from Sequoia, Unitus

A Cuemath teacher and her students. Photo credit: Cuemath.

In my tenth grade, I lost my grip on math. Until then, all the math exams I took were fun because it was easy to score big. But here I was, struggling to wrap my head around equations. Algebra became abracadabra, trigonometry a nightmare, and even little calculations seemed monstrous – to this day.

Luckily, I scraped through the exams. But it’s not very comforting to know that millions of students fear math just the way I do. Those are the folks Bangalore-based Cuemath hopes to help.

Cuemath has developed a learning-by-doing math curriculum for children, starting at kindergarten to class 8, with the help of mathematicians from India’s IITs and IIMs to Cambridge and Stanford University. Their syllabus isn’t just about math but also logical thinking. A child’s mathematical aptitude and her ability to reason creatively are entwined, Cuemath believes.

The startup, which kicked off towards the end of 2013, today announced its series A funding round of US$4 million from Sequoia India and Unitus Seed Fund.

The funding raised early this year is being used to take the Cuemath’s home-based math learning network to other parts of the world and also expand it further in India.

Wanted: teachers who won’t teach

Photo credit: Cuemath.

Imagine you trying to learn swimming by looking at someone swimming. If you want to be great at math, you can’t get there by seeing someone else doing it.

Take a regular fifth grade student, for instance. At her school, the math teacher will tell her about fractions. She will show the kid how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide a fraction. She will walk the kid through all the subject material, while the kid gets very little time in the classroom to practice it by herself to internalize it. That’s conventional education for you. Cuemath works the other way around.

“In our system, the student is actively learning by doing, and the teacher is just the facilitator. We want to build a child’s fundamentals from scratch – from first principles – and enable a child to learn by doing,” Manan Khurma, founder and CEO of Cuemath, says.

“Imagine you trying to learn swimming by looking at someone swimming. If you want to be great at math, you can’t get there by seeing someone else doing it. You have to do it yourself,” Manan says. That is the basic premise of Cuemath.

So Manan’s team developed a reverse pedagogy. They use worksheets, tablet-based exercises, puzzle cards, and so on to gamify mathematics. The children learn by doing in the presence of a Cuemath-trained teacher.

For example, if a child is learning about decimals, the workbooks and the material on the Cuemath tablet will ensure that the child grasps the concept herself. The teacher will intervene only if the child gets stuck somewhere.

An acquisition

Apps won’t work for maths