Massive Tech firms and upcoming startups need to use generative AI to construct software and hardware for youths. A variety of these experiences are restricted to textual content or voice, and youngsters won’t discover that charming. Three former Google staff need to recover from that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli.
Sparkli was based final yr by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As dad and mom, Poojary and Kang weren’t in a position to fulfill their kids’s curiosity or give participating solutions to their questions.
“Children, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions on how automobiles work or the way it rains. My strategy was to make use of ChatGPT or Gemini to clarify these ideas to a six-year-old, however that’s nonetheless a wall of textual content. What children need is an interactive expertise. This was our core course of behind founding Sparkli,” Poojary instructed TechCrunch over a name.
Previous to launching Sparkli, Poojary and Kang co-founded a journey aggregator known as Touring Bird and a video-focused social commerce app, Shoploop, at Google’s Space 120, the corporate’s inner startup incubator. Poojary later went on to work at Google and YouTube on procuring. Marchand, who’s the CTO of Sparkli, was additionally one of many co-founders of Shoploop and later labored at Google.
“When a child requested what Mars appears like fifty years in the past, we’d have proven them an image,” stated Poojary. “Ten years in the past, we’d have proven them a video. With Sparkli, we wish children to work together and expertise what Mars is like.”
The startup stated that training programs typically fall behind in instructing trendy ideas. Sparkli needs to show children about matters like abilities design, monetary literacy, and entrepreneurship by creating an AI-powered studying “expedition.”
The app lets customers discover some predefined matters in several classes or ask their very own inquiries to create a studying path. The app additionally highlights one new subject every single day to let children study one thing new. Children can both take heed to the generated voice or learn the textual content. Chapters underneath one subject embrace a mixture of audio, video, pictures, quizzes, and video games. The app additionally creates choose-as-you-go adventures that don’t create the strain of getting questions proper or fallacious.
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Poojary talked about that the startup makes use of generative AI to create all of its media belongings on the fly. The corporate can create a studying expertise inside two minutes of a consumer asking a query, and it’s attempting to cut back this time additional.
The startup talked about that whereas AI assistants may help kids study sure matters, their focus is just not on training. It stated that to make its product efficient, the primary two hires had been a PhD holder in instructional science and AI and a instructor. This was a aware resolution to make sure its content material higher serves kids, preserving rules of pedagogy in thoughts.
One of many key considerations round children utilizing AI is security. Firms like OpenAI and Character.ai are going through lawsuits from dad and mom who allege that these instruments inspired their kids to self-harm. Sparkli stated that whereas sure matters like sexual content material are utterly banned on the app, when a toddler asks about matters like self-harm, the app tries to show them about emotional intelligence and encourages them to speak to their dad and mom.
The corporate is piloting its app with an institute that has a community of colleges with over 100,000 college students. At the moment, its target market is kids aged 5-12, and it examined its product in over 20 colleges final yr.
Sparkli has additionally constructed a instructor module that permits academics to trace progress and assign homework to children. The corporate stated that it was impressed by Duolingo to make the app participating sufficient that children can study ideas and likewise really feel like coming again to the app often. The app has streaks and rewards for youths for finishing classes recurrently. It additionally provides children quest playing cards, primarily based on the preliminary avatar they’ve arrange, for studying totally different matters.
“We’ve got seen a really optimistic response from our college pilots. Lecturers typically use Sparkli to create expeditions that children can discover at first of the category and lead them right into a extra discussion-based format. Some academics additionally used it to create [homework] after they clarify a subject to let children discover additional and get a measure of their understanding,” Poojary stated.
Whereas the startup needs to primarily work with colleges globally for the subsequent few months, it needs to open up shopper entry and let dad and mom obtain the app by mid-2026.
The corporate has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by Swiss enterprise agency Founderful. Sparkli is Founderful’s first pure-play edtech funding. The agency’s founding associate, Lukas Weder, stated that the group’s technical ability and market alternative nudged him to spend money on the startup.
“As a father of two children who’re in class now, I see them studying attention-grabbing stuff, however they don’t study matters like monetary literacy or innovation in expertise. I believed from a product standpoint, Sparkli will get them away from video video games and lets them study stuff in an immersive means,” Weder stated.
This submit was first printed on January 22, 2026.
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