Curriculum intelligence for Aotearoa — an AI-powered teaching resource platform built by a practising NZ teacher.
The Problem
The 2023 NZ curriculum refresh introduced new achievement objectives across almost every learning area. For classroom teachers — many new to the profession, many managing 30+ ākonga across mixed year groups — that refresh meant relearning what "good alignment" looks like while still teaching full time.
The result is familiar: search Google, find something that looks right, spend twenty minutes checking alignment with the correct achievement objective, discover it doesn't fit, start again. Multiply that by every lesson, every week.
The problem isn't a shortage of teaching resources. It's the cost of finding, evaluating, and contextualising the right one — for the right learner — at the right moment.
Resource hunting is the profession's biggest untracked cost. It happens before every lesson and after every curriculum change.
Most online resources aren't aligned to the NZ curriculum specifically. Teachers must manually verify — or guess.
Mātauranga Māori content exists but is siloed, hard to find, and often treated as an add-on rather than a framework.
The Solution
Te Kete Ako runs a triple-search architecture across 12,929 resources indexed against 10,500 verbatim NZ curriculum achievement objectives. A teacher searching for "whakapapa and identity, Year 9 Social Studies" gets semantically matched resources — not a Google result.
Fast, familiar. Matches resource titles, tags, year levels, and curriculum areas. Instant results.
Neo4j semantic graph traversal. Understands curriculum structure — related objectives, prerequisite concepts, cross-strand connections.
Qdrant embedding search. Finds semantically similar resources even when the exact words don't match.
Te Tiriti as Design Principle
Te Reo Māori is integrated throughout the platform interface, resource metadata, and search vocabulary — not siloed into a separate section. Mātauranga Māori content is indexed and surfaced through the same search pathways as any other resource. This reflects the commitment in Te Tiriti o Waitangi to tino rangatiratanga: the right of Māori to exercise authority over their own knowledge systems.
The Market
Current focus: NZ secondary teachers (Years 9–13), approximately 18,000 practitioners. At $18.40/month, even 1% penetration represents $3.3M in annual recurring revenue.
The adjacent market is larger: primary teachers, teacher educators, school leadership, kāhui ako clusters, and the Ministry of Education's curriculum support infrastructure.
The platform's architecture is subject-agnostic — what works for Social Studies works for Science, Mathematics, and Technology.
Business Model
Te Tiriti — $18.40/mo · $184/yr
Kaiako Pro — $20.99/mo · $199/yr
Individual teacher subscriptions. Direct-to-teacher, frictionless sign-up.
Half-day — $150 + $20/pp
Full-day — $250 + $30/pp
Community AI literacy for non-technical adults. Raglan (Whaingāroa) and beyond.
School clusters / kāhui ako
Institutional access replacing individual subscriptions. Pipeline target: 2027–28.
The Founder
Tobias Croydon-McRae is completing his GDipTchg (Secondary) at Waipapa Taumata Rau, specialising in Social Studies and Digital Technologies. In his first year of classroom teaching, he helped lift literacy achievement by over a full stanine at a school carrying significant challenges.
He built Te Kete Ako because he experienced the resource problem from the inside. That understanding — of what a teacher on a busy Tuesday morning actually needs — is not available to an EdTech company that has never taught a class.
Te Kete Ako is designed, built, and operated solo: three production MCP servers, a hybrid RAG pipeline, Stripe billing, and a full-stack web platform.
The Path Ahead
Go deeper
The full 1,000-word entry for the University of Auckland Velocity Ideas Challenge — formatted and presented.
→ 📄 Business Plan 2026Lean canvas, market analysis, financial projections, grant pipeline, and competitive positioning.
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