How cool would it be if you could learn at your own pace without feeling overwhelmed for being behind. Or learning more slowly than others? This is what Kognity is all about.
Kognity is a high-growth EdTech company that has captured the public’s attention with its digital textbook. Designed to align with how a student thinks, learns, and progresses. The platform doesn’t present the same content to everyone. Instead, it adapts to each user’s performance during classes. Adjusting learning, questions, and paths so students can progress at their own pace.
For years, textbooks barely changed. Teachers printed and shipped new ones, and sometimes updated them after a while. But every student in class still used them the same way. Regardless of how fast or slow they understood what was written in the textbooks. Kognity came into the picture and decided learning should no longer work like that.
Hugo Wernhoff, Nicholas Johansson, and Marcus Erlandsson founded it in 2014 and headquartered the company in Stockholm, Sweden, as an online learning tool. Its main purpose is simple: to help students understand better and teachers to be more effective.
“We didn’t want to be ‘just’ an edtech company, or ‘just’ a content and curriculum publisher—and so we became a marriage of both those things.” Says Hugo Wernhoff, CEO of Kognity.
It differs from the traditional textbooks, which are already defined and one-directional. Kognity operates differently. What the platform does is that it combines interactive content sessions, assignments, analytics, and flexible learning paths into a unified online resource. It aims to help teachers personalize how they teach each student. In addition, students are given feedback and practice guides in line with their performances.
Kognity’s platform is being used by institutions around the world. According to statistics, it has roots in more than 130 countries, across 2,000. Also, over a million students and teachers have interacted with it. This tells you just how broad its reach is in international and English-language curriculum settings.
It is popularly used by schools looking for digital solutions that can combine content, practice, and insight into one tool for their curricula, like the International Baccalaureate (IB) and Cambridge IGCSE.
Kognity’s appeal lies in how it consolidates everything for its users: content, assessment, and live progress tracking are all easily accessible in one place.
It reported more than 6.2 million students’ learning hours logged into its system, alongside millions of answered practice questions as well. For teachers, using it reduces the time they spend grading, planning, and manually tracking progress. While the numbers are a testament to how far Kognity has come, they cannot properly explain why schools prefer to use the platform, although the numbers illustrate just how many users find Kognity helpful.
The main impact lies in the system. It automatically reveals where each student is struggling, which helps their teachers to pick this up before it becomes too late. Feeding happens instantly for students. Teachers don’t delay it or show it during the next class, and over time, this approach shapes how learning happens in the classroom.
Kognity is usually adopted at the school or program level. Teachers use the platform to directly assign content and practice questions, while students go through their assigned lessons at their own pace and without any pressure.
While this goes on, in the background, performance data is being calculated. Over time, it paints a picture of how a student understands their lessons. This is the part where Kognity starts to feel less like a digital book and more like educational technology software designed for modern classrooms.
Kognity has continued to grow. In 2023, the company bagged $5 million in venture capital to start its expansion into the United States. This financing was led by Mars Growth Capital. They had also previously gotten a $4.4 million backing from Nordic investors such as Norrsken Foundation and Gullspång Invest.
With a workforce of about 50-200 people, the market estimates Kognity’s valuation to be around $100 million, reflecting its growth and growing popularity in the world today.
Image: Unsplash
Kognity’s model shows people are leaning towards adaptive learning systems that are able to personalize content to suit a particular student’s performance. This mix of content, analytics, and flexible learning options helps a lot of teachers to understand what each student needs and how to go about it.
With the addition of assessments on the platform and enabling teachers to track each student’s progress, Kognity is turning the textbook from static material into a digital and dynamic tool.
Textbooks are linear: everyone moves in a predictable order. From page one to page two, chapter one to chapter two, and one volume to the next. It moves at the teacher’s pace, regardless of how hard it is for students to keep up.
Digital textbooks, however, are very observant. They don’t leave any student behind. Everything a student does is recorded in silence. And with the data collected, the platform can suggest additional classes and hints to understand a particular topic or call the teacher’s attention to that particular student. Some parents might wonder if there’ll be a particular curriculum assigned to each student, but the curriculum stays the same. The only thing that changes is how the student learns.
Personalised learning is usually seen as a promise and not a process. In Kognity’s case, it follows a different pattern. It is built from small, continuous adjustments. The platform addresses weak areas, adds more challenges in areas where students are more confident, and highlights issues before it becomes more challenging.
It reduces the tension or worry that students face when lessons are moving too fast or too slowly. For teachers, intuition is replaced with evidence, making it clearer for them to see who needs help, why the student needs help, and where the student needs help.
There’s a feedback loop at the core of Kognity’s system. Every interaction generates data, teachers or the system process the data, and the results shape the next step in the learning process. Over time, the system identifies learning patterns and generates effective explanations.
Teachers can access this information from the dashboards that show both individual progress and class-wide patterns. Instead of teachers carrying out observations only during test or exam periods, they can observe learning diligently as it happens.
As Kognity takes care of the continuous instructional work, the role of the teacher starts to evolve, and their workload becomes lighter. They spend less time delivering identical, repetitive explanations. More time is spent observing the performance of each student, carrying out discussions with them, and offering support to the ones lagging.
Teachers become decision-makers who make use of data provided by the platform to shape how they interact with and educate their students instead of solely depending on a static textbook.
Adaptive learning platforms like Kognity are gaining even more attention as they grow because their platform is a reflection of how education should operate in this modern era. Classrooms are becoming more diverse. Learning paths are uneven. Accountability pressures remain high. And each student cannot be on the same level intellectually, so alternatives are important.
Schools are also expected to show progress with limited resources, which can prove difficult. As a result, adaptive learning tools are now a necessity to help the school, its teachers, and the students as well. The textbook hasn’t disappeared. It has simply learned how to respond to each student.
Kognity exists to change an existing idea: using “one pair for every size leg” for every student. This leaves a lot of students behind simply because they can’t keep up with the pace. Its digital textbooks promote a flexible learning approach for each student.
In conclusion, Kognity represents a different path from rigid educational materials toward responsive systems. This doesn’t mean learning becomes entirely automated; it simply means it gains more knowledge. Students and teachers benefit from this as well; they gain better tools and receive relevant support. The trend of digital learning and EdTech platformsshow that learning will lean towards educational models that are flexible, responsive, and continuous.