Our investment in Canopy Study

We’ve partnered with Canopy Study to lead their $1.1 million seed round. Founded in 2021 by Dean Mikan, Ethan Catzel and Andre Avedissian, Canopy Study enables teachers to build personalised and engaging learning content and quizzes using content-driven AI. 

Making time for great teaching 

Teachers are extremely time-poor and under-resourced in the best of times. When you add a global pandemic to the mix, they’re faced with additional demands on top of compiling lesson plans, devising assessments and providing marks. 

From a student’s perspective, everyone learns differently; whether that’s a preference for reading lectures, learning from flashcards or devouring practice quizzes. But adapting resource materials to fit the preferences of a student is onerous, and clearly identifying what subject matter an individual student needs to refine or accelerate beyond is difficult. 

What if you could efficiently harness the largely untapped power of artificial intelligence in education to create individualised learning resources for students at scale? That is the premise behind Canopy Study.  

The future of learning is adaptive and personal

Canopy Study leverages AI to enable educators to create adaptive learning resources that aim to drive increased student engagement and retention. By shortcutting the time to create resource materials, educators spend less time marking and generalising content and more time engaging with students on a more personal level – all of which contributes to a more engaged and inspired learning experience.

Previous generation startups are reliant on large content creation teams to produce materials, which isn't just inefficient and unsustainable but also compromises personalisation.

Canopy Study is changing this. Through large language and learning models, Canopy Study’s platform ingests data from a host of sources and converts it into formative learning resources – allowing teachers to leverage their existing materials without needing to manually create new material. See for yourself: 

This becomes a complementary tool for teachers to produce materials like quizzes and flashcards in a matter of minutes, and to track student performance in real-time. More than that, it gives students the best possible learning experience according to their individual needs. 

And it works: Over 84% of students who have used the platform so far say Canopy Study greatly helps them prepare for tests and 88% report a better understanding of their lesson content.

Education in a post-pandemic world

It’s no surprise that we saw more edtech startups come to life during the pandemic as more educators were pushed to adopt technology-based tools in a remote world. Some tools required teachers to change their behaviour or methods – think video conferencing – whilst others augmented a teacher’s toolkit. 

We’re now at a unique point in the pandemic wherein hybrid models of learning (and working) are becoming the norm, so in-person teaching is re-emerging. Of all of these fairly new edtech solutions, which will remain in use, and which have an expiry date attached to them as kids start returning to classrooms once more?

At Folklore, we look for companies that have a long lifespan ahead of them – companies that are built to last and will ultimately outlive their founders and even us investors.

The magic of Canopy Study is that it moves teachers away from the traditional one-to-many teaching model and gives them the ability to provide a one-to-one learning experience – whether in a classroom or on a Zoom call. Its platform complements, rather than disrupts or replaces, the learning experience. We believe that they have a long and exciting journey ahead of them, but the team is just getting started. 

Backing builders: What’s next?

In founders Dean, Ethan and Andre we see a winning combination of technical know-how, youthful zeal and the kind of passion that comes from firsthand experience. We have conviction that they will reshape the future of learning, which is not just confined to the walls of classrooms but covers the full spectrum of lifelong learning. 

Classrooms are just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much potential for AI to transform and improve the way people learn, and we believe that Canopy Study is well-positioned to lead this transformation across Australia and New Zealand as well as the rest of the globe.

It is our privilege to lead their seed round and be amongst their earliest supporters. We look forward to watching Canopy Study’s impact unfold across Australia and beyond.