98. Synap

Founders: James Gupta
Founded: October 2015
Website: www.synap.ac

At 25, Synap founder James Gupta has already sold his first business, taxi booking app JumpIn, to Addison Lee for £180,000.

Now, while simultaneously studying for a medical degree, the young entrepreneur – who writes a business blog for Startups.co.uk – is busy scaling his second.

Launched in 2015, Synap is an online study platform and revision tool that allows teachers and students to create multiple choice quizzes, which can be taken at any time and shared with others online. So whether it’s plant vascular systems, the history of the Western Front or quotes from Great Expectations, there’s unlimited potential to populate and learn.

Claiming to be the “world’s most intelligent study tool”, Synap helps users learn more efficiently by using ‘Spaced Repetition’ algorithms: a memory technique that prioritises the questions you see regularly, based on how well you perform on different topics. Students receive a handful of questions every day and can see their results improving over time.

Available across multiple platforms through iOS and Android, the app works on a freemium model, with premium subscribers able to access unlimited quizzes, control the types of questions they see and track their progress for £20.99 a year.

Over 20,000 quizzes are now available, with users also able to buy premium quizzes created by leading figures from top tier educational publishers including Oxford University Press Clinical Handbooks. The company cites research that claims we forget 40% of what we’ve learnt after just 20 minutes, and 80% after one week.

Having created novel technology to solve a problem it says mainstream education remains oblivious to, Synap is planning to live long in the memory, making a difference one quiz at a time.