Michał Borkowski and the homework that never ends

Before Michał Borkowski had a company to run, he had classmates who could explain things. One understood physics. Another could help with biology. A difficult subject for one student was familiar territory for somebody nearby. School issued individual marks; the students quietly operated an exchange.

Years later, he would describe the arrangement with appealing economy: “No one knew everything, but everybody knew something.” There is an entire product idea tucked inside that sentence. A student asking for help might have something useful to give back. Knowledge could circulate, provided there was somewhere for the exchange to happen.

That became the starting point for Brainly, which Borkowski co-founded in Krakow in 2009 with Tomasz Kraus and Łukasz Haluch. Its first Polish service was called Zadane.pl. The premise was accessible enough to survive without a lengthy explanation: bring your question, find someone who understands it, and help somebody else when you can.

The explanation was simple. Making a company out of it would occupy rather more of his life.

An education before the education company

Borkowski began doing business at 16. Growing up in Poland, he worked on websites and learned about attracting visitors through search engines. Before Brainly, he had also co-created online question-and-answer networks. He was already exploring the peculiar business of persuading people to contribute what they knew.

He went to Warsaw to study corporate finance at the Warsaw School of Economics. The degree placed him near the language of investment and business models. His internet projects supplied another kind of education: people might arrive with a question, but the service depended on somebody else being willing to answer.

In those earlier projects, he found that questions organised around a specific subject could work better than general ones. Education gave the exchange a purpose. Students did not need to invent a reason to visit; an assignment had already provided one. A confusing equation could be an effective invitation.

His own memories supplied the human part of the design. Students were accustomed to helping friends. The opportunity was to make that useful relationship available beyond the people sitting beside them.

A million users make a poor side project

The founding partnership had an appropriately internet-era beginning. Borkowski met Kraus and Haluch through Gadu-Gadu, the Polish instant messenger. They had been working on web projects; he was a client of their agency before they decided to become partners. The route from a chat window to a shared company was shorter than the route from that company to a reliable business.

Brainly initially fitted around other commitments. Then the service attracted a million users within a year. A side project had begun to make a persuasive argument for a promotion.

By July 2014, Brainly was reporting more than 25 million monthly unique users. Its networks allowed students to post questions, contribute answers and earn points. Teachers and other moderators helped keep the exchange useful. The schoolroom habit had acquired accounts, rules and a growing audience across borders.

There was a social proposition underneath the mechanics. A person struggling with one assignment could still be competent at another. Asking a question did not consign someone to a permanent category of people who needed help. They could change places on the very next page.

In 2015, Borkowski told the story of a student from Texas who was good at physics and had become a senior moderator on Brainly. The platform gave him a place to use that ability and take responsibility for helping peers. It was a concrete example of the exchange Borkowski wanted to encourage: a student could arrive with subject knowledge and find a role beyond answering a single question.

He also observed that most users chose to participate without a real photograph. The classroom’s familiar social signals could recede. What mattered in a thread about physics was whether someone could explain physics. For a founder trying to encourage questions, that was a meaningful part of the product.

The Atlantic is wider on an organisation chart

International ambition brought an awkward choice. Borkowski could concentrate on making money in Poland, pursue growth abroad, or try to do both. He chose international growth. There is something bracing about the decision: the company would postpone one useful task to give another a chance.

“The ability to say no is one of the most important skills to learn.”

Michał Borkowski

The US mattered both as a market and as a place to find investors who understood the kind of company he wanted to build. In 2014, Brainly raised a $9 million Series A led by General Catalyst. A New York office made the American ambition physical. Borkowski spent four years there building the US operation before returning to Poland.

The practical consequences were less tidy than the map. Two offices created difficulties around communication and keeping people focused on the same priorities. An organisation could share a mission and still need help understanding what the other team was doing. The founder of a service for exchanging knowledge had acquired an internal version of the problem.

By 2019, Brainly’s audience was being described in terms of 150 million people. A decade after the original Polish launch, the business had travelled far enough that its home market accounted for only part of the community. Borkowski’s working life now involved the distance between an idea that could cross a border quickly and an organisation that had to follow it.

Who pays for the next explanation?

Audience growth brought another assignment. A company offering help needed a way to pay for providing it. In 2016, Borkowski was publicly discussing experiments with charging for services and the risk of monetising the wrong thing. Restrict the feature that made the community valuable, and a promising business could shrink its own opportunity.

The US also offered a commercial attraction: users willing to pay for online services. His finance education was meeting a problem considerably messier than a classroom exercise. A service could be useful, popular and still require difficult decisions about which parts should carry a price.

Brainly expanded through acquisitions as well as its own development. OpenStudy joined in 2016; video-learning startup Bask followed in 2018. Each addition widened the ways students could receive an explanation. Text was useful. Sometimes a voice and a demonstration could make the same idea easier to follow.

Financing continued too. The company raised an $80 million Series D led by Learn Capital in 2020. That is company funding, a resource for the work ahead. The everyday test remained much smaller than the number: could a student who was stuck get an explanation that helped?

Borkowski’s responsibilities stretched across company strategy, product strategy and culture. The product had to function, the organisation had to function, and both needed enough money to keep functioning. Entrepreneurship has a habit of setting all three deadlines for the same afternoon.

A very particular sort of landing

There is a quieter detail in his 2018 account of life outside work. Borkowski enjoyed flight simulators, particularly the task of bringing an aircraft down gently. He was careful to clarify that he was playing a simulator, rather than flying a real plane. Becoming a pilot, he suggested, might be an appealing alternative life.

The detail is pleasing because it is so specific. Plenty of executives speak warmly about challenges. Fewer describe the satisfaction of a carefully improved virtual landing. Here was a hobby with procedures, feedback and another attempt available whenever the last one was imperfect.

It would be excessive to turn an evening pastime into a theory of leadership. It does, however, give the biography a person-sized detail: alongside the expanding company, someone was enjoying the work of getting a small thing right.

The next question comes after the answer

Brainly’s more recent changes put a different tool inside the original exchange. In February 2025, the company announced an AI Learning Companion, with features planned for rollout during the year. The proposition included guided homework explanations, study plans and support built around a student’s own materials.

For Borkowski, personalized learning had become a central ambition. The original community matched a question with somebody who knew more. AI offered a way to adapt the explanation itself. Whether that promise succeeds depends on what a student can understand afterward, a rather more demanding test than how quickly words appear on a screen.

The latest product description, published in July 2026, brings homework help, studying and test preparation into one platform. It describes educator involvement, verified Experts, step-by-step guidance and practice based on completed coursework. Those are design commitments. They place the burden on helping someone handle the next problem, beyond supplying a response to the current one.

The ambition has also taken Borkowski into public policy conversations. In September 2025, he attended a White House event for companies signing an AI education pledge. Brainly committed to free access for participating students. He also expressed an interest in similar partnerships in Poland and other European countries.

The geography is larger now, and the technology has changed. Borkowski is still working around the same familiar moment: somebody has reached a part of the lesson they cannot explain. Somewhere, there is help. His continuing assignment is to make that meeting happen, and to leave the student able to do a little more when it ends.