Synthesis School

Synthesis (Synthesis School, Inc.) is an online children's learning company headquartered in San Mateo, California, founded in 2020 and derived from a course taught at Ad Astra, the experimental school created on the SpaceX campus in 2014 at Elon Musk's request. Its original product was a weekly live cohort program in which small groups of children, grouped by age, played proprietary open-ended games and simulations together over video conferencing. Named games include Constellation and Proxima (space exploration), Art for All (an art-auction game covering auctions, the winner's curse, double-entry bookkeeping and negotiation), Fish (a resource-management game about the tragedy of the commons) and Fire! (a cooperative forest-firefighting game). Teachers act as facilitators rather than instructors: rules are withheld so students infer them, and sessions end with group analysis of outcomes. The program is organized around five axioms (embrace the chaos, test your assumptions, seek good explanations, expect course corrections, contribute to the good) and four qualities (grasp, voice, ownership, flow), with a Foundation stage followed by a broader Progression stage, plus optional extra sessions, speaker events and community activities such as an astronaut AMA. Parents receive weekly recap emails and video snippets rather than participating directly.

The company's current flagship product is Synthesis Tutor, a personalized math tutor for children aged 5-11 delivered on tablet or desktop. It covers counting and cardinality, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions and algebraic thinking, adapting to the learner, evaluating answers immediately, targeting knowledge gaps and reporting progress to parents while requiring minimal parent or teacher involvement. The company positions it as a digitally native, multisensory and gamified alternative to textbook- and worksheet-derived tools, and offers a free times-tables flashcard tool without signup.

Founding story

In 2014 Elon Musk, reportedly following a disappointing parent-teacher conference, asked teacher Josh Dahn to build a school from first principles for his children and those of SpaceX employees, with the principles of grouping children by ability rather than age and teaching the problem rather than the tool. Dahn created Ad Astra on the SpaceX campus, where the goal was described as developing students enthralled by complexity and by solving for the unknown; Synthesis was one of its courses. Chrisman Frank, who had been the first engineer at ClassDojo, visited Ad Astra, observed the Synthesis class and set out to make it available to students worldwide; he became co-founder and CEO of the company, which was founded in 2020 and originally available only to a small number of SpaceX families.

Business model

Synthesis sells direct-to-consumer subscriptions to families. The original offering was a paid weekly live online cohort program (reported at $180 per month in late 2020) with monthly billing and cancellation handled by contacting the company. The current Synthesis Tutor product is sold on monthly, annual and lifetime plans: individual plans listed at $45/month, $29/month billed annually ($348/year) or $999 lifetime, and family plans covering up to 10 students at $70/month, $400/year or $1,499 lifetime, each with a seven-day free trial and no credit card required to try the product. The company also invites schools and classrooms to contact it, indicating an institutional channel alongside the consumer plans.

Recurring consumer subscription revenue from monthly and annual plans for individual children or families, supplemented by one-time lifetime purchases; the earlier live cohort program was billed monthly.

Traction

The company states that more than 35,000 families use Synthesis Tutor (a second figure of 25,000+ also appears on its site). A third-party profile reports about 200 employees as of February 2024 and total funding of $17 million as of February 2023. The earlier cohort program ran waitlisted, age-banded cohorts around the clock for students internationally.

Latest developments

The company's site now centers on Synthesis Tutor, marketed as a personal math tutor for ages 5-11 with adaptive lessons, progress reports and pricing described as less than $1 per day, and cites more than 35,000 participating families. A third-party research profile lists roughly 200 employees as of February 2024, a Series A stage, and describes a math tutoring system developed in partnership with DARPA researchers along with a summer camp program.