Formerly called MyCQs Industry Education Applications | Type Privately held company Founded October 2015 | |
Founders James Gupta & Omair Vaiyani | ||
History
Synap was developed by James Gupta and Omair Vaiyani, two medical students at Leeds Medical School, with an interest in neuroscience and memory. Having used spaced repetition software such as Anki in the past, they created a website that allowed students to write crowdsourced quizzes in a Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) format.
Contents
MyCQs
The first incarnation of Synap operated under the name 'MyCQs', which was released as a native iOS application and website in 2012, and initially gained popularity amongst UK medical students
During this time, CEO James Gupta was recruited as the Chief Technology Officer for JumpIn, a student-focused taxi booking and sharing app. The company was acquired by taxi firm Addison Lee in 2014, after which James returned to focus on MyCQs.
In 2014, MyCQs received funding and mentoring from Jisc, an education technology charity, and received a scholarship from The University of Leeds.
Synap
In 2015, the team shifted focus by integrating more algorithms based on educational psychology research, and started to describe itself as a 'personalised learning' platform. This also led to the company being renamed Synap
Crowdfunding
In August 2015, Synap launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube.
Functionality
Synap uses the concept of spaced repetition to send new content to users based on what they need to practice the most. In this sense, Synap is similar to existing spaced repetition platforms such as Anki and SuperMemo, though notably it does not support the creation of flashcards, which are more commonly associated with spaced repetition.
Infrastructure
Synap was originally developed on Facebook's Parse platform. In January 2016, Facebook announced that Parse would be closing down, and advised developers to migrate their apps to other services. As of March 2016, Synap has been hosted on Amazon Web Services, using the newly open-sourced Parse Server, which itself uses Node.js. The website is developed in Ember.js, and uses a MongoDB database, making Synap an example of full stack JavaScript development.
Recognition and Awards
Synap has been featured in The Guardian, Business Insider, and The Oxford Public Health Magazine.
In December 2015, Synap was listed as one of 10 British AI companies to look out for, by Business Insider.