AI tutor platform Matr has raised £4.75 million in Series A investment round led by the UCL Technology Fund and Downing Ventures, with follow-on investment from Ananda and Nesta, and Sherry Coutu joining as an angel investor.

The company, which is a leading player for online maths intervention programmes for Key Stage 2 pupils has now raised £8.25 million in funding.

The new investment will be focused on developing the Matr platform to support families at home and catering to a global teaching and student base.

Disrupting the tutoring market through AI

Tom Hooper, founder and CEO of Matr said ‘By partnering with new investors, and some of the world’s leading learning scientists at UCL, we are well positioned to accelerate our vision of creating a global community of online teachers and students, making effective one-to-one learning accessible to all.’

David Grimm, manager of the UCL Technology Fund at Albion Capital said the company has the potential to achieve traction in global tutoring markets. He said, ‘Its plans to build an efficient AI system and use it to certify its teachers with a UCL qualification will set it apart in this unregulated market.’

The UCL Technology Fund is managed by Albion Capital in collaboration with UCL Business and is dedicated to bringing UCL’s research in life and physical sciences to commercial reality. Matr is the fifth AI business the fund has invested in to date.

What is Matr?

Matr, founded by Tom Hooper in 2013, is an online teaching company which uses technology to train academic talent from around the world to deliver live, online tuition to students. The platform has delivered over 500,000 one-to-one sessions to nearly 40,000 children across the UK from tutors based in India and Sri Lanka.

The company says it is using its database of over 500,000 recordings of online teaching sessions to develop AI software to automate the training and development of a global community of online teachers. Using this innovation, UCL is aiming to develop a qualification, powered by analytics in the Matr platform, to establish a global standard in online teaching.

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