Australia’s teachers are up against overload, burnout, and some of the worst behavioural issues in the OECD.

They don't have time for lesson planning within the working day, and they don't get paid overtime to do it at home. 

Understaffing in overflowing classrooms means giving one-on-one help to every student is impossible.

As a result, 30% of Aussie kids are on the brink of illiteracy. 

Cleverbean isn’t just planning to help teachers plan. It’s already helping students learn in half of Australia’s primary schools.

(Re)meet the founders

We initially invested in Cleverbean in early 2023.

Lucy and Alina already had a huge content library, impressive organic traction (largely via word of mouth), early indicators of product-market fit (teachers paying out of pocket), and some of the most glowing user testimonials we’ve ever seen.

Their NPS was sitting at 80, and 96% of survey respondents were confirming it saved countless hours of lesson planning. Their saving of unpaid overtime meant they were willingly paying for Cleverbean out of their own pockets. 

It was an added expense for notoriously underpaid professionals - but the affordable subscription model proved a small price for an easier life.

These organic inroads made for an excellent bottom-up GTM strategy, with teachers taking it to their school heads to encourage school-wide adoption. 

But going direct to source (i.e. getting schools and government to pick up the bill) is where Cleverbean would really start to scale. 

Why we (re)invested 

Through deep interrogation of the problem throughout their first few months with us, Lucy and Alina found that:

• Over 90% of student writing work did not get high-quality feedback - and that there is a direct correlation between feedback quality and student capability
• Only around 15% of students are getting feedback on their schoolwork within 24 hours
• 100% of graduate teachers (first 5 years of teaching) were not able to give high-quality explicit feedback on student writing.

It was an undeniable problem of a huge scale. 

AI isn’t just a VC hype train, nor is it just for writing dodgy student essays - it may be able to plug gaping holes in the learning experience.

In Lucy’s words: 

“This isn't about replacing teachers, rather allowing them to focus on guiding and caring for their students. AI can automate high volume tasks, leaving teachers and students to deliver personal support.”

Everything Cleverbean does is backed by data, learning science, and obsessive attention to the customers/teachers (helped by Lucy having been one!). With our support, they put in the work to:

• Increase subscription revenue 11% month-on-month 
• Achieve 10% MoM user growth on both their monthly and annual subscription offering.

Deploying more capital is always part of our plan (not just our sales pitch). 

So to take them on to the next level of direct-to-school distribution, we doubled down in late 2023, as well as connecting them with external investment from a number of our LPs.

How we helped

“Skalata has been a fantastic partner, accelerating our decision-making with valuable mentorship and connecting us to a vast network of supportive individuals.”

“Claire's dedication to empowering female founders and her insights on handling gender bias have been a beautiful personal addition and have enhanced a variety of our stakeholder interactions.”

Being supportive and empowering is an important part of the package. But the real transformational work comes with delving into every area of the business and reinforcing it from the inside out:

GTM strategy

Then: Organic traction and signs of PMF through their D2C model.

Now: An evolved GTM that shifted customer acquisition focus from individual teachers to B2B (school) sales. 

The team found early success going straight to teachers and then selling upwards to schools (a bottom-up B2B approach). All schools who have purchased an annual subscription were acquired through teachers lobbying school heads to sign up.

Alina says:

“We can now scale effectively into the broad use-cases we have, as we better understand the most meaningful ways to tackle classroom experiences, while keeping the teacher well in the loop.”

Working closely with B2B sales expert and Skalata advisor David Wei, the team set to work on their outbound strategy. 

They learned how to capitalise on key sales opportunities like Book Week and back-to-school time. And they learned what was really important to school principals and other decision makers - like having a real life teacher (Lucy) in the room.

Lucy’s abilities to storytell and give anecdotal insights were invaluable in connecting with school higher-ups. Paired with Alina's commercial acumen, they’re a dream founding team. Claire says:

“They’re so close to their customers which is super important for building, iterating, and getting feedback quickly.”

Their hard work on a tough GTM pivot netted them a huge win - approval as NSW Government Preferred Suppliers - making Cleverbean available at a click to all 2,200 NSW primary schools. 

In Alina’s words: 

“Any NSW Government school can purchase a Cleverbean licence via their in-house procurement system. This has been a phenomenal win for our team, and will be an even bigger win for the teachers and students of NSW.”

Product and AI

Then: A content platform providing ready-made lessons and resources with early integration of AI and data models.

Now: A data-rich platform that gives detailed insights and feedback at the individual teacher, student, and school level. 

Skalata’s initial investment gave Cleverbean runway to reach proof of concept for their AI suite, and subsequent investment will enable rolling it out to schools.

Using OpenAI’s API and prompt engineering based on huge amounts of collected data, Cleverbean can give students real-time contextual feedback for the micro-skill they’re learning.

In plain English, this means every single student gets tailored, age-appropriate, and encouraging feedback at a micro level (think a teacher spotting a minor spelling error or helping you with syntax as they pass your desk).

This is far from AI for AI’s sake. Currently, less than 7% of students get this one-on-one teacher time at a given point during a lesson. 

It's a leading contributor to declining literacy levels. Painstakingly collected testimonial has confirmed that is a top priority for school boards - and one that no one else is solving across the entire teaching cycle. 

Alina says:

“Our approach shifts from simple grading to genuine progress assessment by invisibly capturing data. Educators view this as a game-changing advancement, as it personalises learning and moves away from standardised assessments.”

After testing with hundreds of students in East Coast Australian classrooms, Cleverbean found students loved the feedback they received from the tool, and teachers consider it akin to having extra educators in the room – redirecting their precious time and focus into students who require 1-1 support.

Team

Then: A dream founding duo (an education industry insider and an ex-Qantas commercial expert) plus a team of freelance content creators. Self-belief and momentum, but no real sounding board or advisors. 

Now: A growing and actively recruiting team with a CTO (ex-Qantas, ex-Okta tech lead Reza Nouri), huge amounts of pressure testing completed, new and even bigger ideas, and validated assumptions. 

The next round of funding will allow Cleverbean to bring Reza on full time, speeding up product development and enhancing product capability.

Flexible positions for a front end developer, data scientist, product designer, and educators as required will keep Lucy and Alina freed up for frontline sales.

Moving up a grade 

This new round of investment will enable new content, new sales channels, and safer technologies for school compliance. 

We’ll continue to work closely with Lucy and Alina on deepening B2B growth, optimising GTM, and pursuing additional revenue via a per student pricing model.

The product will deliver an end to end solution, fulfilling the entire teaching cycle from lesson planning to delivery to assessment to feedback - eliminating the need for multiple tools and annoying sign-ins.

As always, data is king (or principal?) - all assessment inputs will inform planning and delivery outputs, keeping Cleverbean paces ahead of the competition.

Next up are more pilot studies and rolling out the AI feedback engine. Lucy and Alina will do what they do best - constantly and obsessively listen to the customer.

Lucy says: 

“The nucleus of what we do solves three key problems - providing the best quality materials for teachers, making them lightning-fast to find, and ensuring that every student is being pushed to their highest level.”

In the meantime, teacher stress levels go down, jobs are retained, and learning outcomes are being improved across the country. 

One of Cleverbean’s huge advantages is the sheer customer love - the customer being people who care hugely about their students' education. 

Having to battle school heads for resources and then grapple with software that's supposed to help them is not what they need.

They don't want a crutch. They want lessons they can be proud to deliver.