Croatia’s Photomath secures $23 million for popular math app

(Photomath)

ZAGREB, 18 February (Hina) – The Photomath company has secured $23 million to continue developing its Photomath application for learning mathematics, which has been downloaded more than 220 million times, company founder Damir Sabol and investor partners said on Thursday.

Sabol made the announcement at an online press conference, underscoring that his investors were from the Silicon Valley.

Photomath is a free, simple-to-use application which operates as a digital mathematics tutor and helps students and parents in solving mathematical tasks. The task can be hand-written or typed up on a computer while the application uses computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve the problem.

“This investment is very important for us and even though Photomath has still not become a business unicorn, market potential does exist and even though it’s not easy, we are on the right track,” Sabol said. He would not comment on whether his investors would gain a 10% interest in Photomath.

He added that his current ownership share and that of other company founders is about 50% and that those shares decreased when other people invest, adding that employees have an opportunity to obtain shares in the company and that in the seven years since the company developed the application, about $40 million had been invested in total, including the latest investment.

Sabol said that the market potential lies in one billion students who are learning mathematics.

About 50% of users are secondary school students and about 20 percent are in elementary school, there are a lot of university students and teachers, while about 7% of users are parents who wish to use the app to help their children.

The strongest market is the USA where about 25% of users come from, followed by Russia (12%), and then Indonesia, Brazil, Italy and so on. Unfortunately, there are not too many students in Croatia using the app, added Sabol.