'I never want a teen to say they can’t do maths': Cork start-up aims to help students 

It is ten o’clock on a Tuesday night. A third year is at the kitchen table with her maths homework open, stuck on the same question for 20 minutes.

Her mam comes in to help, looks at the page, and can’t. The book closes. “I’m just not a maths person.”

I watched some version of that every week for four years.

I started giving maths grinds in Cork when I was in college, and I loved the moment a student goes from “I can’t do this” to “oh, I actually get it”.

But the longer I did it, the more one thing bothered me.

The students I was tutoring had parents who could pay €40 or €50 an hour. The students who were most lost, the ones who needed someone beside them most, mostly didn’t have that option. So they fell a bit further behind every term, and by third year maths was a thing they hated and had given up on.

I don’t believe any of them couldn’t do maths. They needed someone to ask them the right question at the right moment, and that someone was too expensive.

I finished my degree in Data Science and Analytics at UCC in 2025. The sensible thing was to get a job. I didn’t, because I kept thinking about that gap.

In 2025, I started building MathMate, and I wrote every line of it myself. If I was going to spend my twenties working hard, I wanted it to be on something I had chosen, that made a difference I could see.

UCC’s IGNITE programme for graduate start-ups took me on, and my co-founder, Ula Dudek, still a UCC student, runs the design side.

MathMate is an online maths tutor for Junior Cycle and Leaving Cert students, built around the Irish exam papers and the official marking schemes.

When a student is stuck, it does not hand over the answer. It asks what they would try next, nudges them one step at a time, and marks their work the way an examiner would.

Teachers can set the same questions to a whole class and see, before Monday morning, exactly who got stuck and where.

There is modern AI under the hood, but it is built to behave like a patient tutor rather than a shortcut, because a shortcut teaches nobody anything.

Two months in, more than 1,300 students have used it. Schools in Cork and Tipperary use it with their classes.

A lot of the activity happens during the school day, students pulling it out in class the moment they are stuck, which is exactly the moment a tutor is never there.

The first parent who paid for it asked, in the same conversation, whether her second child could go on it too. Students use it free, and the paid plan costs less than 20 minutes of a grind.

I haven’t paid myself a cent yet.

On November 11, we will present at the UCC IGNITE Awards and Showcase, the first time we will get to stand up in front of a room in Cork and say what we have done.

Then the job is simple to describe and hard to do: get it into every school and every home in Ireland that needs it.

Because the problem is not small.

Every year, tens of thousands of Irish students sit the Junior and Leaving Cert, and a huge share of them have, at some point, closed the book at a kitchen table and decided something about themselves that isn’t true.

There is real stress and anxiety around maths in this country, and most of it comes from being stuck with nobody to ask.

I want every one of those students to have a tutor who never runs out of patience and never costs €40 an hour.

If you have a Junior Cycle or Leaving Cert student at home, they can try it tonight at mathmate.ie.

And if they get stuck at ten o’clock on a Tuesday, at least this time there will be someone to ask.