How Enuma built a learning app serving 10 million children worldwide

Executive overview

Half of all children are designed to fail by education systems built for average learners. Enuma built adaptive learning software for struggling learners — children with disabilities, language barriers, or under-resourced environments.

Winning the XPRIZE global competition validated the model and funded expansion. The pandemic then unlocked mass market adoption.

Education built for the margins serves everyone left behind — and becomes a viable business.

Personal motivation and founding story

• Sooin Lee's son was born with a disability and spent two months in hospital after birth
• Searching for special education software, the quality was far below game industry standards
• She and her co-founder Connoh decided to build better tools using their game design backgrounds
• Realised struggling learners aren't only children with disabilities — many fail due to environment and lack of support

Products and early traction

• Todo Math: launched 2014, targets kindergarten to grade 2 children struggling with basic counting, adding, subtracting
• Todo English and Todo Korean followed; all popular across Korea, Japan, and China
• KitKit School: won the Global Learning XPRIZE, co-winner of $5M from a $15M prize pool funded by Elon Musk
• Raised $23M in venture funding; 10M+ downloads; number one app in app store markets

Unintended market problem in China

• Todo Math's Asian release attracted wealthy parents using it to prep 18-month-olds for kindergarten entrance exams
• This was the opposite of the intended use case — closing learning gaps, not creating competitive advantages
• Lost motivation to stay in B2C; tried to enter public school systems but found no fast path to scale

XPRIZE competition and Tanzania field lessons

• XPRIZE tested whether tablet-based education could work for children with no school access; UN ran the largest-ever pilot in developing countries
• In Tanzania, five-year-olds watched videos but refused to touch the screen — a pattern not seen elsewhere
• A Tanzanian team member explained: children are taught not to touch valuable objects at home, fearing they'll break them
• Fix: added a short video of a tutor saying "you can touch it" — immediately resolved the issue
• Lesson: children's failure is often caused by educators' cultural blind spots, not the child

Pandemic as inflection point

• Pre-pandemic: parents and governments skeptical of digital education
• Pandemic forced governments to adopt remote learning; parents saw its value firsthand
• B2C revenue increased tenfold from that point

Mission-driven company vs. nonprofit

• Enuma is venture-backed, not nonprofit — but describes itself as mission-driven
• The founders had other options; Enuma exists because the problem is real, not because it was the easiest path
• Investor advice: "You're not the fastest growing, but you can become the most successful company at the end"

Fundraising as a female, immigrant founder

• Early angel investors said directly: "Are you ready to replace your CEO with a white male?"
• Told she couldn't succeed because she wasn't fluent in English or educated in the US
• Advice to other female founders: be brave; the external challenges are real but not the hardest ones you'll face