PhotoMath

About PhotoMath

Photomath is an educational technology company, now owned by Google, that offers a mobile application designed to help users learn and solve mathematics problems. The company was founded in 2014 by Damir Sabol, a Croatian engineer and serial entrepreneur, along with Sasa Skevin, Marko Mihovilić, and Matija Korpar. Sabol's inspiration came from a personal pain point: helping his own children with their math homework. He leveraged the text recognition technology from his previous company, MicroBlink, to create an app that could read and solve math equations using a smartphone camera.

The business operates primarily in the ed-tech market, serving a diverse client base that includes students from middle school to the college level, as well as parents and teachers. The company follows a freemium business model. The core application is free to use and provides step-by-step solutions to a wide range of math problems. Revenue is generated through a premium subscription service called 'Photomath Plus'. This paid tier offers enhanced features such as animated tutorials, deeper explanations for problem-solving steps, and solutions to problems from entire textbooks. Another facet of its operations involves a marketplace where math experts can earn money by solving and reviewing user-submitted problems.

The Photomath application is its central product. Users can point their device's camera at a printed or handwritten math problem, and the app's optical character recognition (OCR) and AI technology will recognize and solve it. Its key feature is the detailed, step-by-step explanation that accompanies each solution, which aims to teach the underlying concepts rather than just providing an answer. The app covers topics from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus and trigonometry. For problems that can be solved in multiple ways, the app presents various methods. A significant milestone was the acquisition by Google, which was announced in May 2022 and finalized in June 2023 after regulatory approval. This event marked one of the largest startup acquisitions in Croatian history and led to the establishment of a Google R&D center in the country.