A teacher hits "start." The room goes quiet. The dashboard lights up.
Somewhere right now a teacher is projecting a question onto a wall, and twenty-eight students are tapping answers on twenty-eight devices. Within seconds the teacher knows exactly who got it, who guessed, and who is quietly lost in the third row. That moment - the gap between "I taught it" and "they learned it" closing in real time - is the entire point of Classtime.
Classtime is a web-based platform for formative and summative assessment, built in Zurich in 2016 and now run across two continents. Teachers use it to write quizzes, pull from a free library of more than 30,000 standards-aligned questions, run gamified collaborative challenges, and watch results arrive live. It works on any device, needs no installation, and grades the boring parts automatically. The company is small - around 53 people - but its software shows up in classrooms in more than 60 countries.
"Founded in 2016, Classtime was made with a mission in mind: to show a clear path to student success."
Grading is where teaching goes to die.
Every teacher knows the trap. You can lecture brilliantly and still have no idea whether anyone understood a word until the test comes back - by which point the moment to fix it has passed. Assessment, the thing meant to reveal learning, usually arrives too late to do anything about it. And the paperwork that follows eats the evenings that should have gone to actual teaching.
Classtime's founders looked at that and saw two problems wearing one coat: feedback that comes too slowly, and a teacher's time spent on correction instead of instruction. The fix wasn't another flashy game show. It was making understanding visible while the lesson is still happening, and quietly automating the rest.
"We still need more empirical studies on the impact of educational software."
Two CEOs, two continents, one stubborn idea.
Classtime is run by an unusual arrangement: Valentin Ruest, the founder, leads the company from the United States, while Jan Rihak runs the European and DACH markets as co-CEO. Micha Rise serves as CTO. Ruest, who studied at Harvard and the University of St. Gallen, has been candid that edtech leans too hard on hype and not hard enough on evidence - an awkward thing to say when you sell edtech.
So they made the awkward thing the strategy. Rather than chase the loudest leaderboard, Classtime bet that schools would eventually want proof. Build the platform on learning science, document the theory of change, and let the certifications follow. It is a slower bet than going viral. It is also, conveniently, the one that district purchasing committees actually reward.
"Our goals are long-term. We are growing steadily in all markets."
What teachers actually do with it.
The platform is deliberately unglamorous in the best way. A teacher opens a browser, builds an assessment or borrows one from the library, and sends it to students. From there the software does the watching.
Formative & summative tests
Create, run, and auto-grade digital assessments with nine question types, from multiple choice to category sorting and free text - with real-time feedback per student.
30,000+ question library
A free, standards-aligned bank including questions handcrafted with partners like Khan Academy, so teachers don't start every lesson from a blank page.
Collaborative challenges
Narrative-driven activities projected on the classroom wall, where students solve a shared problem individually, in teams, or as a whole class.
Real-time analytics
A dashboard with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics that surfaces participation and progress instantly - plus AI-assisted question generation.
It plugs into Google Classroom and, since 2021, has been part of Google for Education's Integrated Solutions Initiative. The throughline across every feature is the same: collapse the distance between asking and knowing.
How a Zurich quiz tool went global
Receipts, not vibes.
Plenty of edtech companies claim impact. Classtime went and got it certified. In August 2025 it earned Digital Promise's Research-Based Design ESSA Tier 4 certification, submitting evidence that its design is grounded in research on how students learn. Then in January 2026 it cleared the higher bar - Evidence-Based EdTech ESSA Tier 3 - a tier reached by only about a dozen providers.
The customer base reads like the strategy worked: cantonal schools across Zurich and Switzerland, large regional schools in Germany, and major district schools in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of teachers and learners use the platform, and the company funds its expansion on a Series A from institutional backers rather than a blitz of venture cash.
Classtime, by the numbers
"We are delighted that we were able to bring institutional partners on board in this financing round."
Make learning legible.
Strip away the dashboards and the certifications and the mission is plain: show every learner a clear path to success, and give teachers back the hours that grading steals. Classtime frames assessment not as a verdict handed down after the fact but as a feedback loop running while there is still time to act on it.
That's also why the company keeps poking at its own industry, arguing publicly that edtech needs more empirical proof. It's a strange marketing move - admitting the field overpromises - until you notice it doubles as a moat. The companies that can actually show evidence win the rooms where evidence is required.
Class sizes aren't shrinking. Attention is.
The pressures that created Classtime are getting heavier, not lighter. Teachers face fuller rooms, wider ranges of ability, and a generation of students who scatter the moment a lesson loses them. AI now writes questions in seconds, which only raises the stakes on the harder question Classtime was built around: not how to produce more content, but how to know whether any of it landed.
A tool that tells a teacher who is lost - while the lesson is still happening - is worth more in that world, not less. Classtime's bet on evidence over spectacle looks less like caution and more like timing.
The room is no longer quiet.
Return to that teacher who hit "start." Before Classtime, the silence afterward was a guess - a hope that the lesson stuck, confirmed or denied weeks later by a stack of paper. Now the silence is full of information. The teacher sees the third-row student stall on question four and walks over before the bell rings. The pop quiz stopped being a verdict and became a conversation.
That's the change Classtime is quietly making, one dashboard at a time, in 60-plus countries. Not louder classrooms. Clearer ones.
Five things to know
- Classtime is run by two CEOs at once - Valentin Ruest in the US, Jan Rihak in Europe.
- No app install required. The whole platform runs in a browser, on any device.
- Collaborative challenges open with a story projected on the wall before a single question appears.
- The company publicly argues edtech needs more proof of impact - then earned the certifications to back it.
- Founder Valentin Ruest studied at Harvard University and the University of St. Gallen.