MathU, explained.
Everything a journalist, partner, or funder needs to describe MathU accurately — boilerplate, the three divisions in depth, the product catalogue, which numbers are cleared to quote, and an FAQ. Started 2026-07-28.
Boilerplate
Use as-is. If a different length is needed, cut from the long version rather than writing new copy.
MathU is a South African education-technology company that makes learning easy — across subjects and across settings, from townships to classrooms to workplaces.
MathU is a South African education-technology company that makes learning easy. It works across subjects — maths, science, English, accounting and more — and across settings, through three divisions: Society for under-resourced learners, Academy for schools, and Corporate for workplace training. Synthetic tutoring is one of its tools, alongside teaching and materials.
MathU is a South African education-technology company built on a simple idea: make learning easy. It works across subjects — maths, science, English, accounting and more — and across the settings where learning actually happens, through three divisions. MathU Society reaches under-resourced learners, both intensively through mentoring and at scale through printed exam practice. MathU Academy gives schools everyday tools that reduce teacher admin. MathU Corporate builds practical, measured capability inside companies. A single toolkit of ten products sits underneath all three, and every programme reports through MathU Tracker, so impact is measured rather than asserted. Synthetic tutoring is one tool among many, alongside great teaching and real materials.
MathU — education technology, built in South Africa.
Fact sheet
| Company name | MathU |
| What it is | Education-technology company |
| Country | South Africa |
| Headquarters | Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Team size | 13 |
| Divisions | MathU Society · MathU Academy · MathU Corporate |
| Giving vehicle | MathU Foundation — a registered Public Benefit Organisation (PBO), issues Section 18A certificates |
| PBO registration no. | 2021 / 482421 / 08 |
| Products | 10 — see §04. MathU Infinity · SAM · SnapSAM · AgenticONE · OnlyTests · OnlyTestsGo · Merlin · Bursary Portal · ReX / ICMS · MathU 2.0 |
| Subjects | Maths, science, English, accounting and more |
| Measurement system | MathU Tracker |
| Social | None yet — no MathU channels are live. Say "not currently on social" rather than leaving a journalist to search and find something that is not ours. |
| Curriculum map | 3,527 micro-topics · 3,103 prerequisite links · grades 7–12 |
| Website | mathu.co.za |
| Media contact | Rikus du Preez · rikus@mathu.co.za |
Deliberately absent: funding raised, revenue, valuation, ownership structure. Add only what you're willing to see printed.
The three divisions
This is the section to send a journalist who wants to understand the business, not just quote a number.
Society exists for learners who have the will but not the materials — township and rural learners. Its defining idea is that it runs two delivery models at once, and deliberately does not pretend one replaces the other.
| Micro | Macro | |
|---|---|---|
| Product | MathU Infinity | OnlyTests |
| Price | R21 000 / learner / year | R1 750 / book |
| Shape | Mentored, intensive support for a focused group | Exam-ready practice in thousands of hands |
| Optimises for | depth | scale |
Why it matters for a story: the honest tension. Micro changes a life and costs 12× more per head; Macro lifts a whole cohort and cannot mentor anyone. Sponsors choose the trade-off explicitly, and Tracker reports what their money actually changed.
Who it serves: under-resourced learners · partner schools that host bootcamps and run OnlyTests across grades · sponsors and CSI funders who want measurable impact rather than a logo on a banner.
How the giving works
Fund a Micro cohort or Macro books at scale.
MathU Foundation, a registered PBO, issues the certificate.
Supports a deduction, subject to the limits SARS sets.
Tools used: SAM · SnapSAM · AgenticONE · OnlyTests · Bursary Portal
Academy sells schools a homework engine, and the homework engine is the story.
What makes it different is underneath it. MathU's curriculum is mapped as 3,527 micro-topics joined by 3,103 prerequisite links across grades 7–12 — not a syllabus list but a map of order: what a learner has to hold before the next thing can land. 1,184 of those topics are places you can start cold; 124 are keystones with ten or more topics waiting on them. Homework is routed along that map, so a learner who misses a step gets sent back to the step rather than further down the chapter. Most homework products mark an answer. This one knows what the wrong answer means.
What the teacher gets from that: practice that never runs dry, because the next right question is always derivable · marking that happens without them · per-topic mastery for every learner rather than a mark out of ten · every topic banded at-risk, developing or on track, so a parent conversation starts from evidence.
What the learner gets: stepwise audio walk-throughs that talk them through a problem one step at a time (SAM), a photograph of a stuck question answered in seconds (SnapSAM), and a synthetic tutor they can argue with out loud (AgenticONE) — all pointed at the same map, so help is never off-topic.
Who it serves: schools rolling MathU out across grades and subjects · teachers who want insight and less admin, not another system to babysit · parents who want to know how their child is really doing.
Tools used today: MathU Infinity · SAM · SnapSAM ·
AgenticONE · Merlin
In design: MathU 2.0
Training your teams will actually use.
Most corporate training is bought to be evidenced, not to be used: a course is run, a register is signed, and nothing about how the company works is different on the Monday. Corporate is built against that. The work is done with a client's teams on the client's own work, not delivered as a generic course off a shelf — so what people practise on is the thing they will be doing the next morning, and the capability is left inside the business rather than inside a slide deck.
Teams build it on their real work, with us alongside them. Success is that they can do it without us afterwards.
Practical guardrails and review, taken into the field where the decisions actually get made — not a policy written in a head office for a process nobody in the field recognises.
ISO/IEC 42001-aligned processes a leader can put their name to, because the people who sign off carry the risk.
Why this division exists at all. It is the same company that teaches a Grade 9 learner exponents, selling to an executive team — and that is the point rather than a coincidence. MathU's whole method is the map underneath Academy: work out what somebody already holds, find the prerequisite they are missing, and route them to it. That is the same problem a company has when it needs a function competent by a deadline, and most training providers have never had to solve it for a fifteen-year-old who will simply stop trying if the next step is too far.
Where it fits. Society is funded by donors, Academy is sold to schools, Corporate is sold to companies — and Corporate is the one that carries no learner. It is the division that makes the economics work without a sponsor in the room, which is worth understanding before assuming a company this shape must be a charity with a product attached.
No client names. Ever. Not a permissions question to work through later — no company, school, sponsor or funder is named in this kit or to a journalist off the back of it. If asked: engagements are the client's to talk about, not ours. Nothing to check, nobody to ask.
Who it serves: enterprises upskilling at pace · L&D and people teams · boards and compliance leaders who have to sign something.
Tools used: AgenticONE · Merlin · ReX / ICMS · MathU 2.0
Product catalogue
Ten products, one toolkit. One-liners below are the approved descriptions.
Adaptive practice across subjects that keeps serving the next right question — it never runs dry.
Stepwise audio walk-throughs that talk a learner through every problem, one step at a time.
Stuck? Snap a photo of the problem and get guided help in seconds.
A tutor you can actually talk to — ask out loud, get answers, understand.
Exam-ready test books in print — real past-paper-style practice across subjects.
The same exam practice on your phone — OnlyTests, wherever you are.
The teacher's assistant — plan, mark, and send feedback in a fraction of the time.
Where sponsors fund learners and follow every result the funding makes possible.
The content engine that keeps every question fresh and curriculum-aligned, across subjects.
The next-generation platform bringing every MathU tool into one place.
Demo-able for press: AgenticONE (a real recorded session — "Introduction to exponents", Grade 9, 13 turns) and Merlin (auto-generated lesson report). [NEEDS INPUT — is there a press-safe demo environment or recording we can hand out?]
Numbers — cleared to quote
Source for all: MathU Tracker, 2023–2025 unless noted. Every figure MathU holds carries a provenance flag — this section is the only place that matters for press, because a press kit gets quoted verbatim with no "unverified" pill attached.
Why the last two are safe to print: they are counts, not claims — a script reads the taxonomy and writes them, so anyone can re-run it and get the same numbers. One caveat if a journalist digs: the map is Mathematics (2,792) and Science (734); Mathematical Literacy has a single node, which is a real gap in the data rather than a rounding artefact. Do not describe the map as covering Maths Lit.
There is no "held back pending verification" tier any more. Three figures used to sit here — 85,080 OnlyTests assessments, 625 Micro learners and Merlin's 509 / 49 / 91% — carried from an older deck and never re-checked. They were removed rather than left as homework: they are not "unverified" now, they are simply not here, and they should not be reintroduced from an old deck. If Society scale comes up, the answer is 5,000 learners reached.
What the press can say
Approved framing
- "Education technology, built in South Africa." The origin is part of the story, not a disclaimer.
- "Makes learning easy." The actual positioning. Not "revolutionises", not "disrupts".
- "Across subjects and across settings." Maths is the heritage and the name, but the platform is not maths-only.
- "Synthetic tutoring is one of our tools, alongside great teaching and real materials." Not a technology company that happens to do education.
- The word is "synthetic tutoring", not "AI". Platform-wide: synthetic tutoring learner-side, synthetic teaching teacher-side. Exceptions are citations that belong to someone else — ISO/IEC 42001 is a standard's number. mathu.co.za uses "AI" zero times; this kit should too.
- "Measured, not asserted." Every programme reports through Tracker.
- Print matters. OnlyTests is a physical book — a feature in low-connectivity contexts, not a legacy format.
Do not say
| "AI tutor that replaces teachers" | The opposite of the positioning — teachers are the customer in two of three divisions. |
| "ISO 42001 certified" | We are aligned to ISO/IEC 42001. Certification is a different claim with a different evidence bar. |
| "Proven to improve results by X%" | No efficacy study supports a causal claim. Usage growth ≠ outcome improvement. |
| "Donations are tax deductible" (flat) | Say a Section 18A certificate is issued and supports a deduction subject to SARS limits. |
| Any Corporate impact number | No Tracker series exists for Corporate. |
| A maths-only description | Understates the platform. |
| Named corporate clients | Not ours to give without permission. |
Style
MathU (one word, capital M and U). MathU Society / MathU Academy /
MathU Corporate / MathU Foundation. Rand as
R21 000 with a space. Never use emoji in MathU-branded
material.
Story angles
Ordered by how likely a journalist is to bite.
R21 000 mentors one learner; R1 750 reaches a cohort. A company that publishes both numbers and lets funders choose.
A print product inside a synthetic-tutoring platform, because connectivity isn't universal.
Against the sector's live evidence-gap story — only pitch if we're precise that Tracker measures usage, not causal outcomes.
362 teachers using it daily; the product that gives them time back rather than replacing them.
The same prerequisite map serving a rural learner and an executive team.
FAQ
Makes learning easy across subjects and settings. Three divisions: Society (sponsor-funded, for under-resourced learners), Academy (paying schools), Corporate (workplace training). One toolkit of ten products underneath.
No. Synthetic tutoring is one tool among several, alongside teaching and printed materials. Some products lead with it (AgenticONE, Merlin, SnapSAM); others use none of it at all — OnlyTests is a printed book.
POPIA is at the front of how MathU is built, not a compliance step at the end. MathU signs data-processing agreements and NDAs with the institutions it works with, and treats minors' data as the most sensitive thing it holds — because that is most of what it holds. [STILL NEEDED, and a school's legal team will ask for all four: which system holds what and where it is hosted (this site's console database is in europe-west1, a cross-border transfer that needs its POPIA §72 basis stated); retention periods and what happens at contract end; how parental consent for under-18s is captured and by whom; and a flat yes-or-no on whether learner data is ever used to improve a model.]
Merlin listens to a lesson and returns a report — what was covered, where time went, which objectives landed — and helps plan, mark and give feedback. Positioned as reducing admin, not replacing instruction.
Yes — through MathU Foundation, a registered PBO, which issues a Section 18A certificate for qualifying donations. Impact is reported back through Tracker.
Brand assets
Business unit marks
Every mark below is a download — click to save the source file. These are the same files the site itself uses, so they can never be a stale copy.
Product marks
No logo yet for MathU Infinity, OnlyTestsGo, Bursary Portal, MathU 2.0 — they render as styled text on the site.
SNPSTR AI, MathU Skunk Works and MathU Varsity are excluded deliberately. They exist in the brand library and they are not press assets: not in this kit, not sent to a journalist, not part of the story MathU is telling publicly — Skunk Works is unreleased work by definition. If a journalist turns one up from somewhere else, it is still not ours to talk about here.
No palette or typography spec here on purpose. The table that used to sit
here was also wrong: it named #8052ff purple as the primary,
and purple stopped being the brand when Version B landed — anyone who had
built a graphic off this page would have built it in the previous brand.
If a colour and type spec is wanted back, it gets generated from the live
tokens rather than retyped.