Big tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to create software and hardware for children. Many of these experiences are limited to text or voice and children may not find it engaging. Three former Google employees want to overcome this obstacle with the interactive application Sparkli, based on generative artificial intelligence.
Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were unable to satisfy their children's curiosity or provide engaging answers to their questions.
“Children are, by definition, very curious, and my son would ask me questions about how cars work or how rain falls. My approach was to use ChatGPT or Gemini to explain these concepts to a six-year-old, but it's still a wall of text. Kids want an interactive experience. That was our core process behind starting Sparkli,” Poojary told TechCrunch over the phone.
Before founding Sparkli, Poojary and Kang co-founded a travel aggregator called Touring Bird and the video-based social commerce app Shoploop at Google Area 120, the company's internal startup incubator. Later, Poojary worked at Google and YouTube in shopping. Marchand, who is Sparkli's CTO, was also one of the co-founders of Shoploop and later worked at Google.
“When a child asked what Mars looked like fifty years ago, we might have shown him a picture,” Poojary said. “Ten years ago we could have shown them a video. With Sparkli, we want kids to interact and experience what Mars looks like.”
The startup found that education systems often lag behind in teaching modern concepts. Sparkli wants to teach children topics such as skill design, financial literacy and entrepreneurship by creating an AI-powered “learning journey.”
The app allows users to explore predefined topics in various categories or ask their own questions to create a learning path. The app also highlights one new topic every day so kids can learn something new. Children can listen to the generated voice or read the text. Chapters within a single topic include a mix of audio, video, images, quizzes and games. The app also creates adventures as you go, without the pressure of asking right or wrong questions.
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Poojary mentioned that the startup uses generative AI to create all of its media assets on the fly. The company can create a learning platform within two minutes of a user asking a question and is trying to reduce that time even further.
The startup mentioned that while AI assistants can help children learn certain topics, their focus is not on education. The company said that for the product to be effective, its first two hires were PhD students in educational sciences and artificial intelligence and a teacher. It was a conscious decision to make its content better serve children, taking into account the principles of pedagogy.
One of the key concerns for children using AI is safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.ai are facing lawsuits from parents who say the tools encouraged their children to self-harm. Sparkli said that while some topics, such as sexual content, are completely banned on the app, when a child asks about topics such as self-harm, the app tries to teach them emotional intelligence and encourages them to talk to their parents.
The company is piloting its application in cooperation with an institute with a network of schools with over 100,000 students. Currently, the target audience is children aged 5-12, and last year it tested its product in over 20 schools.
Sparkli also built a teacher module that allows teachers to track progress and assign homework to children. The company said it was inspired by Duolingo to make the app engaging enough for kids to learn concepts and also feel like coming back to the app often. The app offers series and rewards for children for regularly completing lessons. It also gives children activity cards, based on the starting avatar they have created, to learn about various topics.
“We have seen a very positive response to our school pilot programs. Teachers often use Sparkli to create expeditions that children can explore at the beginning of class and lead them to a more discussion-based format. Some teachers have also used it to create (homework) after explaining a topic so that children can delve deeper into the topic and build their understanding,” Poojary said.
While the startup primarily wants to work with schools around the world over the next few months, it wants to make the app available to consumers and allow parents to download the app by mid-2026.
The company raised $5 million in pre-seed financing led by Swiss venture firm Founderful. Sparkli is Founderful's first pure-play edtech investment. The company's founder, Lukas Wender, said the team's technical skills and market opportunities led him to invest in the startup.
“As a father of two children who go to school now, I see them learning interesting things, but not topics like financial literacy or technological innovation. I thought that from a product standpoint, Sparkli takes them away from video games and allows them to learn things in an engaging way,” Wender said.
