99Math: maths, gaming and sports rolled into one

“If you have to go to school for 6 hours a day, why should you not enjoy it?” asks Timo Timmi, the 20-year old co-founder of 99Math, an Estonian e-learning maths platform built on the principle of something far more entertaining: gaming.

 “As a student, maths is traditionally a very boring subject. When we spoke to maths teachers and parents, the struggle was apparent for them too: where there is a lack of motivation, learning is always a struggle”. 99Math offers a platform for teachers, students and parents alike to practise their math skills in a fun and engaging way. Teachers can assign homework & receive data on results, while students can play with their friends competitively both at school and at home.

Aged just 17, Timo and his friends founded a student company, selling coffee in tea bags. This endeavour brought him across the path of Tõnis Kusmin, serial Ed-Tech entrepreneur, and the rest is history. “Estonia is one of the best places in the world to be a start-up founder” says Timo, “we have huge companies like Skype and Transferwise which started here. The government encourages the ecosystem with entities like Startup Estonia, bureaucracy here is very limited and we’re a mostly digital country”.

Towards the end of 2019, 99Math had initial market traction, but was looking for a strong venture capital team to propel them forward and help scale the business. Enter Change Ventures, an Estonian VC fund backed by the EIF through the Baltic Innovation Fund (BIF), who invested in 99Math in January 2020. “We wanted to choose investors who would be aligned with our vision” says Timo. Shortly after the investment, the world went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 crisis, so how has the company faired? “Lockdown meant that online platforms like 99Math were drastically needed to cope with home schooling needs, and our user numbers jumped by 250%. We needed to react fast in order to optimise the platform for remote learning”. 99Math was able to quickly organise itself and ran a large marketing campaign with ed-techs from Estonia where basic services were offered for free. The story was later picked up by the BBC and the traction didn’t stop there: “I’ll never forget when Shakira re-tweeted one of our projects to her 52 million followers it was a defining moment for us and it propelled 99Math into the Latin American market”.

So what does the future hold for Timo and 99Math? “We really want to nail maths and further fine-tune our product before we start thinking of moving onto other subjects” says Timo, “one thing we’re moving into is global tournaments, very similar to e-gaming ones, where teams of kids go head-to-head online. We have already done a few tournaments with some 30,000 students participating in real time, it generates so much excitement”.

“I’m so glad that I was able to put my three passions together” says Timo, “gaming, sports and maths. “There are so many things in the world that are exciting,” says Timo, “why shouldn’t we revolutionise education so that students have more to look forward to than just the school holidays?”

Company: 99 Math (Tallinn, Estonia)

Type of business: Digital solutions, education

Financial intermediary: Change Ventures

EIF financing: Baltic Innovation Fund - BIF

For further information about EIF intermediaries in Estonia, please refer to:
http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/ee