Three Polish Founders Bringing AI-Powered Math Education to American Schools

Ryszard Szubartowski taught computer science at the Third High School in Gdynia for decades. Many of his students, such as Jakub Pachocki, now Chief Scientist at OpenAI, built AI systems and founded companies.

Among them were Matt Maslowski, Paul Burzynski, and Kajetan Lewandowski.

That shared starting point matters because of where they ended up. All three distinguished themselves in computer science Olympiads before moving into industry and academia. Maslowski went to Amazon Web Services in London. Burzynski graduated from the University of Cambridge and had a stint at Google in Zurich. Lewandowski built engineering teams in places like London and Warsaw. 

In 2023, they came together to solve the same problem: equitable access to quality STEM education, which remains out of reach for families who cannot afford it. That year, they founded Smartschool.

The Palo Alto-based EdTech startup is now active in 30 school districts across the United States, including New York City's Department of Education and Boston Latin School. The results have been striking. 

At the Science School for Exploration and Discovery in the Bronx, average test scores rose 102 percent. More broadly across the platform, research from the Learning Experience Design Research Institute found that 9 in 10 students meet or exceed grade-level math standards. 

To deliver those results, the Smartschool team built its own AI. It provides real-time feedback on handwritten student work, almost like a knowledgeable tutor.  

Investors are convinced. The $3 million seed round has backing from people who've built category-defining companies. Mati Staniszewski of ElevenLabs, Marcin Żukowski of Snowflake, and Nick Woods of HazelHealth invested personally, alongside institutional names including Inovo VC, the a16z Scout Fund, and The Explorer Fund.  

Matt Maslowski, CEO

Maslowski's passion for helping others succeed runs deeper than his own achievements. His competition record eventually became the foundation for this teaching career. Matt joined the Scientific Committee of the Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics, where he shaped the problems future competitors would face, and co-founded Meet IT alongside Burzynski to help students crack university entrance exams and national competitions. Where those students ended up: engineering roles at OpenAI, Google, and Meta. 

That drive to build things that matter took him to Amazon Web Services in London, then into the fast-moving world of AI strategy at AI REV in New York, where he spent a year at the frontier of what the technology could actually do. He came back convinced that AI had made it possible to fix something that had long been broken in education.

That conviction became Smartschool. Along the way, it earned him a place on Forbes's 30 Under 30 list in the business category.

Paul Burzynski, Chief Product Officer

Burzynski already made his mark on the international stage as a young man. He took gold at the Romanian Masters of Informatics and received a ministerial award from Poland's Minister of Education for academic excellence. In the summer of 2016, he conducted research at MIT under faculty supervision. Paul continued his studies at the University of Cambridge.

At Google's Zurich office, he worked on the deep learning models behind Google Lens, then left to build. He co-founded multiple startups as CTO before eventually landing at Smartschool, each one adding another layer to how he thinks about building companies from the ground up.  

He was also listed on the Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list. 

His job at Smartschool is to make sure the company's technical capabilities are useful for classroom teachers.

Kajetan Lewandowski, CTO

Lewandowski was writing production code before most of his peers had picked a favourite programming language. When Matt and Paul got Meet IT off the ground, he was among the first through the door, and over the next few years, he worked his way up from full-stack developer to Tech Lead to VP of Engineering.

After Meet IT, he wanted to work somewhere the software really mattered to people. That thinking took him to London and Skye Health, where he joined as a Founding Engineer and built a digital therapeutics application from scratch, shipping across iOS, Android, and web for patients managing chronic conditions.

Smartschool launched in 2023, and it wasn't long before he found his way back to the team. As of April 2026, he's CTO, responsible for handling the infrastructure behind the entire platform, which includes tens of thousands of student submissions every day.

A Shared Mission

Their immediate goal is to make their technology available to students in more school districts in the United States. The ambition behind it is larger: a generation of students who leave school genuinely confident in mathematics, in times when mathematical thinking is increasingly more important to the growth of our society.

Follow the Founders on LinkedIn: 

• Matt Maslowski
• Paul Burzynski
• Kajetan Lewandowski

About The Author

Daniel Okafor is a technology journalist and educator with a decade of experience covering EdTech. His particular focus is on startups reshaping how young people learn.