Most exam prep tools feel like they were designed in a vacuum. You open them up and it's the same thing every time. A giant pile of questions. A timer. A dashboard full of charts no one asked for. If you're lucky, there’s a chatbot pretending to be helpful.
It started with a nonprofit and a med student
In 2020, when the world shut down, students were left without the basic support needed to prep for college. Codrut Lemeni, a Romanian software engineer with a background in Olympiads and robotics, built a nonprofit to help. No pitch deck. No monetization plan. Just a way to keep students moving forward when schools were frozen.
A few years later, while working at Palantir, Codrut saw the same problem again. His girlfriend was studying for her medical residency exam and burning out on tools that were either too rigid or too noisy. Everything claimed to be smart but failed to actually support her.
So he left his job and turned that scrappy nonprofit into Educato.
What Educato actually does
Educato is a personalized exam prep platform that adapts to how real people learn. It supports over 10,000 exams across the world, including the IELTS, bar exams, the Romanian Baccalaureate, GCSEs, and university entrance tests.
You choose your exam. The platform builds a plan around it. The content is personalized by language, pace, and learning style. Lessons are short and clear. Flashcards update as you go. Daily simulations help you retain and apply knowledge instead of just memorizing facts.
The experience for someone prepping for the UNMSM entrance exam in Peru is different from someone preparing for the French bar. And that’s the point.
The team behind it is small and focused
There are ten people building Educato. They’re partially remote, fully global, and working directly with educators, students, and universities in each territory. Every new exam launch starts with groundwork. They don’t ship until the material actually fits the exam.
There’s no playbook. Just a long list of things that should have existed already and a team focused on building them one by one.
Five years in and it’s just getting started
The platform hit its five-year milestone last week. The first wave of exams is live. More are on a release schedule and being shaped through real collaboration, not guesswork. There are new features coming too — ones that rely on the scale they’ve finally reached.
AI is part of the infrastructure, but it’s not the headline. The real product is the student experience.
Educato won’t make studying fun. It makes it work
It’s not gamified. It’s not designed to be addictive. It’s not pretending to be your friend.
It’s a serious tool built for people who want to get better at what they’re studying. And in a space full of noise, that might be the smartest approach of all.