Sparkli is a new EduTech startup. It has been brought to life by some very creative minds — Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand and Myn Kang. Sparkli was created to ignite children’s curiosity, especially in kids 5-12 years old. We’ve built our new interactive app, with the help of generative AI, to engage the educational inquiries of today’s youth. The company, which recently closed a $5 million pre-seed round, is Founderful’s first investment in the edtech vertical.
The drive to create Sparkli came from foundling parents own lived experience as parents. As parents, Lakshmi Lax Poojary and Myn Kang soon became frustrated at not being able to fulfill their children’s natural curiosity. This was their biggest challenge, explained how easy it would be to make these in-depth concepts boring, tedious, and overwhelming for the young learners.
“Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about how cars work or how it rains. My approach was to use ChatGPT or Gemini to explain these concepts to a six-year-old, but that is still a wall of text. What kids want is an interactive experience. This was our core process behind founding Sparkli,” – Lax Poojary.
Lucie Marchand, Chief Technology officer for Sparkli. She will be bringing the experience she gained co-founding Shoploop and her previous work at Google to this role. Her knowledge of technology has been key in creating an app. Our goal with this app is to change the way children learn from mobile content.
Sparkli’s app is meant to be as fun and energetic as it is interactive, with influences from apps like Duolingo. The app can generate a learning experience within two minutes of a user posing a question, allowing children to explore topics in real-time. It features a different topic every day of the week, inspiring kids to learn about something new every single day.
The startup last year field-tested its product in more than 20 schools, garnering rave reviews from educators. Hundreds of teachers have used Sparkli to design immersive, inquiry-fueled expeditions that light up the possibilities of spark discussion in the classroom. In other instances, they have built the app into homework assignments to help reinforce and expand students’ understanding of multiple subjects.
“We have seen a very positive response from our school pilots. Teachers often use Sparkli to create expeditions that kids can explore at the start of the class and lead them into a more discussion-based format. Some teachers also used it to create homework after they explain a topic to let kids explore further and get a measure of their understanding,” – Lax Poojary.
Sparkli is preparing to test its app with an educational institution. This statewide institute manages a growing network of schools that currently serves over 100,000 students. Our collaboration allows us to make basic refinements to the app based on real-world classroom experiences and feedback that are collected through the pilot process.
Looking forward, Sparkli aims to introduce wide consumer access by the middle of 2026, with parents able to download the app for use by children. This has gotten the founders excited, especially for how their app can change the way kids learn and play. Their passion is in creating authentic, meaningful, and equitable learning experiences for all.
“As a father of two kids who are in school now, I see them learning interesting stuff, but they don’t learn topics like financial literacy or innovation in technology. I thought from a product point of view, Sparkli gets them away from video games and lets them learn stuff in an immersive way,” – Lukas Weder.
