Former Googlers seek to captivate kids with an AI-powered learning app

Big Tech companies and emerging startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. Many of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and children may not find that engaging. Three former Google employees want to overcome that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app Sparkli.

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 compelling answers to their questions.

“Kids are inherently very curious and my son would ask me questions about how cars work or how it rains. My approach was to use ChatGPT or Gemini to explain these concepts to a six-year-old, but that’s still a wall of text. What kids want is an interactive experience. This was our core process behind the creation of Sparkli,” Poojary told TechCrunch during a call.

Before launching Sparkli, Poojary and Kang co-founded a travel aggregator called Touring Bird and a video-focused social commerce app, Shoploop, in Google’s Area 120, the company’s internal startup incubator. Poojary later went on to work at Google and YouTube in the shopping field. Marchand, Sparkli’s CTO, was also one of the co-founders of Shoploop and later worked at Google.

“Fifty years ago, when a child asked what Mars looked like, we might have shown him a picture,” Poojary said. “Ten years ago we might have shown them a video. With Sparkli we want children to communicate with each other and experience what Mars is like.”

The startup said education systems often lag behind in teaching modern concepts. Sparkli aims to teach kids about topics like skill design, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship by creating an AI-powered learning expedition.

The app allows users to explore a number of predefined topics in different categories or ask their own questions to create a learning journey. The app also highlights a new topic every day, so kids can learn something new. Children can listen to the generated voice or read the text. Chapters under one topic contain a mix of audio, video, images, quizzes and games. The app also creates choose-as-you-go adventures that don’t create the pressure to get questions right or wrong.

Poojary said the startup uses generative AI to create all its media assets in an instant. The company can create a learning experience within two minutes of a user asking a question, and is working to further reduce this time.

The startup said that while AI assistants can help children learn certain subjects, their focus is not on education. To make the product effective, the first two hires were a PhD holder in educational sciences and AI and a teacher. This was a conscious decision to ensure the content can better serve children, keeping pedagogical principles in mind.

One of the main concerns surrounding children using AI is safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.ai are facing lawsuits from parents who claim these tools encourage their children to self-harm. Sparkli said that while certain topics, such as sexual content, are completely banned on the app, when a child asks about topics like self-harm, the app tries to teach them about emotional intelligence and encourages them to talk to their parents.

The company is testing its app at an institute with a network of schools with more than 100,000 students. Currently, its target audience is children ages 5 to 12, and last year it tested its product in more than 20 schools.

Sparkli has 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 so engaging that kids can learn concepts and also feel like coming back to the app regularly. The app offers streaks and rewards for kids if they complete lessons regularly. It also gives kids mission cards, based on the initial avatar they set up, for learning different topics.

“We’ve seen a very positive response from our school pilots. Teachers often use Sparkli to create expeditions for children to explore at the start of class, moving them into a more discussion-based format. Some teachers also used it to create expeditions [homework] after explaining a topic so that children can explore further and get an idea of ​​their understanding,” Poojary said.

While the startup plans to work primarily with schools around the world in the coming months, it wants to open up access to consumers and let parents download the app by mid-2026.

The company has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by Swiss venture capital firm Founderful. Sparkli is Founderful’s first pure-play edtech investment. The company’s founder, Lukas Weder, said the team’s technical skills and market opportunities prompted him to invest in the startup.

“As a father of two children now in school, I see them learning interesting things, but they’re not learning topics like financial literacy or innovation in technology. I thought Sparkli takes them away from video games from a product perspective and lets them learn things in an immersive way,” Weder said.

This post was first published on January 22, 2026.