We’re delighted to announce our investment in MyEdSpace, the live online learning platform built on a simple idea: the best teacher in the country can (and should) teach your child too. We’re backing founders Kharis Yanakidis and Sean Hirons with a £1M round to prove it.
If you share a house with a British teenager, you may already have met Neil, MyEdSpace’s star maths teacher, whose clips get passed around school WhatsApp groups the way football highlights do. That’s the MES product in miniature: teachers with genuine screen presence, streaming live, curriculum-aligned lessons twice a week, backed up by structured homework, revision materials and one of the liveliest student communities online.
The problem this solves is as old as the school system. When the teaching at school isn’t enough, families who can afford it buy their way out: almost a third of young people aged 11-16 have had a private tutor at some point, and in London it’s nearly half. For everyone else, the quality of teaching is a postcode lottery – and teacher shortages keep widening the gap. One year of MES costs less than a single term of weekly tutoring.
India figured this model out first. PhysicsWallah began as one teacher’s YouTube channel and grew into one of the country’s biggest education companies. Nobody had seriously attempted the star-teacher model in the UK, but one call with the MES founders was enough to see we’d found the team to do it.
Kharis built, scaled and sold the online learning company Lectarium before his years as an executive director at J.P. Morgan; Sean cut his teeth at Prosus and J.P. Morgan’s TMT team. Both grew up in families where education was the way up, and both walked away from secure careers in finance to make sure everyone has that same opportunity.
“Ask any adult who changed the direction of their life and 9 times out of 10 they’ll name a teacher. That was the case for me: I grew up in a working-class family, my grandfather left school at 14 and a teacher helped me apply for university, which completely changed my life. The tragedy is how unevenly those teachers are distributed – brilliant teaching shouldn’t depend on your postcode or your parents’ bank balance. Kharis and Sean are putting the country’s best teachers in front of every student, at a price less than a family spends on school shoes. Backing that is exactly why Emerge exists.”
Nic, Emerge
The round will fund more teachers, new subjects and the next stage of the platform’s growth.
Kharis, Sean – welcome to the Emerge community. Class is in session!
