Valentin Ruest

A banker who decided the better return was a kid understanding something.

Valentin Ruest spends his year in two time zones. He is the US co-CEO of Classtime from Santa Barbara, while his counterpart Jan Rihak runs the DACH side from Zurich. The product they sell is unglamorous and quietly radical: software that lets a teacher see, in real time, exactly which students get it and which ones are lost.

That is the whole bet. Not gamified badges, not an algorithm that secretly decides what a child should learn next. A live dashboard of understanding. Classtime is a formative and summative assessment platform, and it is in classrooms in more than 90 countries. The company began life under a different name - Go Pollock - incubated at the EdTech Collider in Zurich, before it grew into the thing teachers now open every morning.

Ruest did not arrive from the world of education. He studied business administration and economics at the University of St. Gallen and Harvard University, then went into finance. At MoneyPark, a Swiss fintech, he ran the mortgage business and sat on the executive board. Before that he was an assistant to a CEO and a supply-chain intern at Triumph International; after, a digital-transformation consultant at the Zuhlke Group. It is the resume of someone headed for a corner office in Zurich, not a startup desk arguing with teachers about pedagogy.

The hill he chose to defend

Most edtech founders sell automation. Ruest sells the opposite. He is openly skeptical of hidden "personalized learning" algorithms - the kind that quietly route a student down a path no human chose. His view is that the teacher is the irreplaceable part of the loop, and the software's job is to hand that teacher better evidence, faster. Data informs the decision. It does not become the decision.

It is a contrarian position in a market that loves to promise the robot tutor. And it shapes how Classtime is built: the platform surfaces a live read of the room so a teacher can act on it within the same lesson, not next week when the test scores come back and the moment has passed.

Collaboration over the leaderboard

The second idea Ruest keeps returning to is teamwork. He argues that the classroom's default setting - competition, ranked against your neighbor - quietly demotivates the students who need the most help. Set a goal the whole group reaches together, and suddenly the strong students have a reason to pull the others up. Positive teams reinforce themselves.

He came to this honestly. Ruest and his co-founders built the original tool after teachers asked for something that engaged a whole class working toward a shared objective - not another way to single out the winner. The real-time progress visualizations that became Classtime's signature grew out of that request.

What the thing actually does

Strip away the philosophy and Classtime is a working tool teachers use in the middle of a lesson. A teacher builds a set of questions, opens a session, and students answer on whatever device they have. As the answers land, the teacher gets a live picture of the class - who is on track, who has stalled, where a whole group has the same misconception. Reviewers walking through the platform as far back as 2018 noted that a question could carry a YouTube clip or other multimedia inside it, so students watched and responded in the same flow rather than bouncing between tabs.

The word that matters in the category is "formative." A summative test tells you, after the fact, how a class did. A formative one tells you, while there is still time to act, how a class is doing. Classtime sells both, but Ruest's instincts clearly run toward the second - feedback fast enough to change the next ten minutes, not just the next report card. That is also why the collaborative mode, with its shared progress visualizations, sits at the center of the product rather than at the edge.

One company, two clocks

The structure of the business is itself a quiet statement. Classtime runs on a co-CEO model split by geography: Ruest leads the US from Santa Barbara, Jan Rihak leads the DACH region from Zurich. It is an unusual arrangement, and a demanding one - the time difference alone means handoffs happen at odd hours - but it lets the company keep a genuine foot in two very different education markets. Rihak's public comments tend toward the analytical, pressing on whether the evidence for educational software is strong enough yet. Ruest's tend toward the practical, focused on teachers and the day-to-day decisions they make. Between them they cover both halves of the argument the whole sector is still having.

The map is uneven

Building globally taught him that edtech adoption has almost nothing to do with how rich a country is. He has watched the technology race ahead in places like Ukraine and California, while Switzerland - prosperous, orderly Switzerland - stays cautious, partly because its homegrown edtech industry is small. The lesson is humbling for a founder: the same product lands very differently depending on the soil.

Slow on purpose

In February 2024, Classtime closed a Series A growth round from Swiss Post Ventures, SuperCharger Ventures and private investors. The language around it was telling. No talk of hypergrowth or domination - instead a deliberate, almost patient framing.

The shape of the money tells you something too. This is not a company that has hoovered up nine figures and set it on fire chasing users. The round brought in institutional partners - Swiss Post Ventures chief among them - precisely for the network and market access they open, not just the cash. For a small Zurich edtech company trying to grow in the UK and the US at the same time, a strategic backer who can make introductions is worth more than a bigger check from a stranger. It is, again, the patient choice.

The capital is aimed at three markets - DACH, the UK and the USA - and at one product idea that fits Ruest's worldview perfectly: using generative AI to strip busywork off teachers' plates rather than to replace their judgment. Classtime is also working with the Jacobs Foundation to build evidence-based standards, a nod to his co-CEO Jan Rihak's point that the field still needs more empirical studies on whether educational software actually works. That intellectual honesty - asking whether your own category delivers - is rare in a sector fluent in hype.

The recognition has followed quietly. HundrED, which scouts education innovations worldwide, named Classtime among the 14 most innovative assessment solutions globally. The company has been profiled by education-technology outlets since at least 2018, when reviewers walked through a platform that already let teachers fold YouTube videos and multimedia straight into a question.

The tell

Here is the detail that explains the rest of him. Ruest runs a company that grades classrooms, and he still teaches personal finance in public schools himself. He did not have to. A co-CEO with a two-continent operation and a board to answer to could be forgiven for never touching a whiteboard again. But standing in front of real students is the cheapest, most honest user research there is - and it keeps the man who builds the dashboard close to the people who depend on it.

That is the throughline from the mortgage desk to the classroom. He moved from a business where the metric was money to one where the metric is whether a teenager finally understands compound interest. The economist never left. He just changed what he counts.