Neo Zhizhong and the classroom that came back

A pat on the back is an awkward feature to put into software. It has no settings menu. It cannot be delivered by a worksheet recommendation. Yet it belongs in Neo Zhizhong’s account of what education needs. The co-founder and CEO of Geniebook spent years building an online learning business, then helped bring physical classrooms into it. For a founder associated with artificial intelligence, that return is a particularly revealing turn in the story.

By 2024, Geniebook’s hybrid campus at United Square offered a place where technology and face-to-face teaching could meet. The room did not erase the screen. The screen gave the room information. A teacher could know something about a student’s strengths and difficulties before class began. That changes the starting point of a lesson: less time spent establishing what the child already knows, more opportunity to work on the part that needs attention.

Neo had an unusually good reason to understand both sides. His route into education began in tuition, before Geniebook’s launch in 2017. The classrooms came first. Software arrived as a response to a problem inside them. When classrooms reappeared in the business, they brought his career into a kind of conversation with its own beginning. There is a pleasing circularity here, although the teacher has acquired rather more information on the second lap.

Before the algorithm, the pupils

In 2007, Neo and Alicia Cheong founded School Plus after university. Their early work involved tailored science and mathematics tuition. Individual attention was central to the offer. It was also the difficulty when the number of students grew. Preparing a different learning experience for each child required people, time and energy. Opening another centre could add capacity. It could also reproduce the same demanding preparation elsewhere.

The problem is easy to picture without pretending to have witnessed their early classrooms. A student who understands one topic may need considerable practice in another. Give everyone identical work and some pupils repeat familiar material while others struggle with the wrong problem. Make everything individual by hand and the teacher’s preparation expands with the class. The business could grow while the attention available to each learner remained stubbornly finite.

Geniebook, launched a decade later, offered another way to organise that work. Machine learning and human teachers would share the task of personalisation. Students and parents supplied feedback as the public platform developed. The founders had to learn how people used the product as well as decide what it should contain. A tuition business had become a software business while retaining an educational question at its centre.

A second apprenticeship in software

Education was one strand of Neo’s career. Software delivery was another. His public career record dates his co-founder role at Rainmaker Labs from 2011 to March 2018. The company worked on mobile applications and other software for agencies and multinational businesses. KPMG acquired it in March 2018. In between School Plus and Geniebook sits experience of making technology work for organisations with requirements of their own.

His published speaker biography describes managing and deploying more than thirty software projects. That is a different education from tutoring. A lesson needs to communicate an idea. A software project needs to survive the trip from requirement to something people can actually use. Both involve discovering that a reasonable plan can meet an unreasonable number of details. Neither is improved by pretending those details will take care of themselves.

Read together, the two businesses help explain why Neo’s later career does not fit neatly into the usual distinction between a teacher and a technology founder. He had co-founded ventures in both fields. Geniebook would require curriculum work and technical work within the same organisation. It was a company built around an overlap in his experience, with Cheong continuing as the other founder and chief operating officer.

The cheque, and the work behind it

In October 2021, Geniebook announced a US$16.6 million Series A led by East Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Apricot Capital had backed a US$1.1 million pre-Series A in 2019. The later round also drew individual investors associated with businesses including Unacademy and Snapdeal. Curriculum, engineering, product and growth were among the areas identified for new hiring. Personalisation at scale required rather more than an algorithm alone.

By November 2021, the company reported about 150,000 students, triple its total two years earlier. Roughly 30,000 were in regional markets including Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia. These are figures from that period, rather than a live counter of customers today. They capture a stage at which a Singapore education business had established a reach beyond its home market.

There is a temptation to begin a founder profile with the cheque because it makes a tidy opening sentence. Neo’s dates suggest another emphasis. The education venture began fourteen years before that funding round. Geniebook had existed for four. The money belongs in the story, but so does the less convenient stretch of years spent working out what could be delivered, to whom, and with whose help.

A worksheet has to earn its place

The platform’s core offer combines three types of activity. GenieSmart recommends personalised practice. GenieClass supplies live online lessons. GenieAsk gives students a route to teachers through chat. The arrangement recognises that practising a question, hearing an explanation and asking for clarification are related but distinct tasks. A child can need all three. Putting a lesson on a screen addresses only one part of that experience.

Neo also appears among the authors of a 2022 paper examining a web-based personalised learning system. The research included a randomised controlled trial involving forty-three primary school students. It reported a statistically significant academic improvement for the group receiving personalised material compared with a group using non-adaptive material. The system also used online activity to assess proficiency and follow progress.

Forty-three is a useful number to keep visible. The study offers evidence from a specific trial, with a specific group, rather than a promise about every child who might use a product. That distinction makes the result more intelligible. Education needs ways of checking its claims. A large audience describes reach; an experiment asks a different question about what happened to learning. A founder whose name appears on such work has participated in that question as well as the commercial one.

A teacher with a longer memory

At an Enterprise Singapore discussion in 2023, Neo set out his view of AI’s place in education. He argued for personalisation at scale, responsible use of student data and continued attention to critical thinking, emotional intelligence and adaptability. He also described AI as a way to improve teachers’ capabilities. Information about performance could help educators identify gaps and leave more time for interaction with students.

“Great teachers become greater.”Neo Zhizhong, on AI as an enabler for educators

There is a practical proposition underneath that compact line. A teacher’s attention has to go somewhere. If software can help establish which concept needs work, the next conversation can begin with a better question. The value depends on how the information is used. A report does not explain itself to a child. Someone still needs to decide how to teach the concept and whether the explanation has landed.

His later interviews continued to emphasise the relationship between teachers and technology. In November 2025, he discussed that combination with Miro Lu on Asia Tech Lens, alongside parental trust, regional learning cultures and the company’s restructuring. The questions had widened from how to personalise a worksheet to how to run an education business across markets. The child’s need for a useful explanation remained recognisable beneath them.

When the customer is family

In May 2024, Neo wrote about Geniebook from the perspective of a parent and uncle. He described his daughter’s growing interest in Chinese books and the experiences of two nieces using the platform. He expressed cautious optimism about his daughter’s progress. For someone whose work involves learning products, seeing a child begin to enjoy reading gives the professional ambition a domestic setting.

He also acknowledged the effort and talent of a niece when discussing her academic success. That qualification matters. A platform can support practice, but the pupil does the learning. A family account cannot settle how well a product works across all its users; it can show what the person building it notices when the learner is someone close to him.

The contrast in scale is part of the appeal of this story. Investment comes in millions. Platforms count users in large totals. A child picking up a book happens one child at a time. A business serving many families must operate at both levels. Neo’s reflection brings them into the same frame without requiring the smaller moment to become a grand announcement.

A room, a balance sheet, a next chapter

By July 2025, Geniebook reported three consecutive quarters of profitability and positive cash flow. Its hybrid expansion included acquisitions of AfterSkool and Best Physics Tuition. Seven physical locations in Singapore were listed at the time. The acquisitions widened its provision in secondary and pre-university education. The classroom return had become an operating strategy, with a financial milestone attached to it.

Outside work, Neo’s published preferences are refreshingly ordinary. In a November 2024 interview, he named cars and cards among the subjects he could discuss, chose coconut ice cream, and listed V for Vendetta and The Big Bang Theory as favourites. A dystopian film and a sitcom make a reasonably broad evening’s viewing. Founders, happily, need not spend every spare hour narrating their mission.

Asked for advice in that same interview, he pointed to seventeen years in education and the importance of actual learning outcomes. His career gives that patience a sequence: tuition, software, an online learning platform, then classrooms equipped with another layer of information. The question running through it is how to give a student attention that helps. After all the building and expansion, a teacher still has to meet the child. Neo’s business has made room for that meeting.