Atomi wants high school to feel less like homework
A decade ago it was a spare-room project filming maths lessons for the HSC. Today Atomi is an online learning platform used by more than a million students and teachers, built on one stubborn idea: engagement comes first, everything else follows.
There is a moment every high school student knows. It's late, the exam is close, and the textbook on the desk somehow makes the whole subject feel further away. Atomi was built for that moment. The Sydney company started in 2013 with a modest premise - a handful of "how to" maths videos for students sitting the New South Wales Higher School Certificate - and a name to match: HSC Hub. What it became is harder to sum up in three words.
Today Atomi is an online teaching and learning platform used by more than a million students and teachers. It sells short, curriculum-aligned videos, interactive quizzes, AI-driven revision recommendations and analytics dashboards, all under one login. The through-line from the spare-room maths videos to the platform of today is a single conviction the founders keep returning to: engagement is the bridge between teaching and learning. Get the engagement wrong and nothing downstream matters.
The ideaBuilt for the kid who scrolls
Ask most edtech founders who they serve and you'll hear a version of the same answer: ambitious students chasing the top of the class. Atomi's co-founders, Robert Barakat and Thomas O'Donahoo, went the other way. Their platform is aimed squarely at the average and lower-performing student - the one for whom a private tutor is too expensive and a textbook is too dull. That is not a small niche. It's most of the class.
The design follows from the audience. Lessons are short and sharp, made for a generation raised on the scroll. A student who won't open a textbook at noon will watch a three-minute explainer at midnight, and Atomi leans into that reality rather than fighting it. The company's own line - "short, sharp and designed for this generation" - is less a slogan than a product spec.
What you actually getVideo, quiz, and a nudge
The product has four moving parts that fit together. There's the video library - hundreds of curriculum-aligned lessons across every high school year level. There are interactive quizzes that mark instantly and surface where a student's understanding is thin. There's an adaptive layer, powered by machine learning, that reads those results and recommends what to revise next. And there's a set of teacher tools: assign content, track a class in real time, and differentiate instruction without building everything from scratch.
The AI here is deliberately unglamorous. It isn't a chatbot that writes your essay; it's a quiet engine that turns a quiz score into a study plan. Boring, maybe. But turning "you got 6 out of 10" into "here's the exact thing to watch next" is the kind of small, useful automation that actually changes how a teenager spends an hour.
How a study session flows
The businessTwo doors, one platform
Atomi sells through two doors. The first is schools, on institutional licences - the B2B side, where a subscription covers a cohort and teachers get the dashboards. The second is direct: individual students, parents and home educators paying for their own access. It's a straightforward SaaS subscription model, and it scales with seats and school adoption rather than one-off sales.
The pricing argument writes itself. A private tutor in Sydney or London runs into real money per hour. An Atomi subscription is a fraction of that and available at 2am. Users have rated it more engaging than rival platforms while costing less than tutoring - the rare combination of cheaper and more liked, which tends to be where durable businesses hide.
The mapNarrow first, then wide
The expansion strategy is worth copying. Atomi didn't try to teach everything to everyone on day one. It won a beachhead - NSW HSC - then went curriculum by curriculum, adding Australian states and eventually the UK's GCSE market. Starting narrow isn't small thinking; it's how a content-heavy company earns the right to go wide without spreading its production thin.
That focus is also why the competitive set is crowded but beatable. In Australia, Atomi shares the field with the likes of Education Perfect, Edrolo and ClickView, plus the entire tutoring industry. In the UK it lines up against Seneca Learning, Atom Learning, Kognity and BBC Bitesize. Against all of them, its wedge is the same: content built to be watched, not endured.
The moneyA capital-efficient nine million
In December 2021 Atomi raised a A$9 million Series A led by Sydney's OIF Ventures, a firm managing more than A$300 million. Next to headline US edtech rounds, nine million is modest. But the year it raised, Atomi added more schools than in the previous three years combined, and more than doubled the number of institutions on the platform. Capital efficiency, in education, tends to age well - you're measured in graduating cohorts, not quarters.
From spare room to platform
- 2013HSC Hub is bornBarakat and O'Donahoo launch in Sydney with a handful of maths videos for the NSW HSC.
- 2015Beyond one syllabusInteractive quizzes and analytics arrive; content expands to more Australian curricula.
- 2017On the radarThe co-founders land on The Educator's Hot List as schools take notice.
- 2021Series AA$9M led by OIF Ventures; more schools added than in the prior three years combined.
- 2022Awards seasonNamed to HolonIQ's ANZ EdTech 50 and wins a 5-Star Service Provider Award.
- 2025Seven figures of usersAtomi reports crossing 1M+ students and teachers across Australia and the UK.
The peopleStill co-CEOs, still building
Barakat and O'Donahoo met at the University of Sydney and have run the company as co-CEOs the entire way. In a market fond of quick flips, a founding pair still steering the ship more than a decade in is the quieter signal. The internal values read like the culture of a company that plans to be around for the long haul: pursue quality at speed, be humble, champion the customer, and - the one that gives the game away - inspire a love for learning.
There's a neat symmetry to the origin, too. The company that now wants students to enjoy studying started because two commerce students thought studying could be better. The homework they set themselves is the same one they've been marking ever since.