Three Google veterans have teamed up to create the curiosity-enhancing edtech startup Sparkli, for children aged 5 to 12. The company recently emerged from stealth, announcing a $5M pre-seed round led by Founderful.
Zurich-based Sparkli develops an AI-based platform that gives users the agency to build their own interactive learning expeditions for children ages 5 to 12 on any topic in minutes. The pre-seed round allows Sparkli to scale its generative learning engine and prepare for a private beta launch in January 2026.
The company is currently validating its platform through a strategic pilot with one of the world’s largest private school groups. This partnership provides Sparkli with a powerful testing ground across a network of more than 100 schools and over 100,000 students. Later, the company plans to extend its platform from curiosity into creation, giving children tools to build and prototype projects directly inside Sparkli.
“Sparkli represents a step change in how children can interact with knowledge,” said Lukas Weder, Partner at Founderful. “The team is applying high caliber engineering and thoughtful pedagogy to a space that desperately needs innovation. Their traction with schools shows a real appetite for tools that foster curiosity and agency rather than passive consumption.”
CEO Lax Poojary and his co-founders, all Google veterans, assembled a team of engineers and designers, including experts from ETH Zurich and the education sector. Together, they are building a platform that fuses generative AI, pedagogy, motion design, and game mechanics to deliver a capable yet safe product that pairs modern technology with strong guardrails and age-sensitive design.
Sparkli’s vision is to become the AI-native operating system for childhood development. In practice, this means if a child asks to build a city on Mars, Sparkli doesn’t just list facts but instantly generates an interactive expedition where they learn age-appropriate physics, simulate the environment, and build their own city. Sparkli’s early tests illustrate these shifts in action. In one classroom, eight-year-olds used the platform to simulate building their own mini food cart businesses, where teachers observed students debating concepts like budgeting and customer experience.
Sparkli positions itself to disrupt the $7 trillion global education market, a sector widely predicted to be one of the most significant use cases for artificial intelligence. While Duolingo has built the largest consumer EdTech business to date by digitizing rigid language drills, Sparkli targets a significantly larger addressable market by reimagining how the next generation acquires knowledge.
(Press release/AJ)
