We’re on a mission to enable everyone to learn better.

Founded in 2025, LearnPF is a learning company in Singapore with a focus on building the next-generation deep learning technologies, grounded in science, that provide students with the most effective education.

Today, we give secondary schools ready-to-run math lessons built on Productive Failure, with a PF-trained AI that never just gives students the answer.

• 

  Alfred Aloysius

  Co-Founder

  Former senior leader at ComfortDelGro, SMRT and SATS.
• 

  Prof. Manu Kapur

  Founder

  ETH Zurich. Pioneer of Productive Failure.
• 

  Jakub Macina

  Co-Founder

  PhD in Machine Learning, ETH Zurich. LLMs and the learning sciences.

The story so far

Productive Failure began as research. Prof. Manu Kapur developed it and has studied it in classrooms since 2006. A review of 53 studies found that it beats Direct Instruction, the teach-first-then-practice approach used in most classrooms around the world, on conceptual understanding and transfer. Researchers in 15 countries now study it.

We started LearnPF because that research was not reaching classrooms. Math scores across OECD countries have fallen since 2012, and students are learning procedures rather than concepts. While they may get the practice questions right, many get stuck when the wording changes or when they have to explain. Productive Failure lessons take expertise and time to design, which teachers who are already busy rarely have. And generative AI has made it worse, because most tools hand students the answer. We are here to change that.

So we built our own AI tutor, fine-tuned to teach the way Productive Failure teaches, from our team’s peer-reviewed research in Findings of ACL 2025 and a field study in Singapore classrooms. Around it we built a learning platform with ready-to-run lessons, adaptive practice and class analytics for teachers. In our pilot from March to July 2026, students using LearnPF made 5× the progress of a typical school year, and the students who started behind gained the most and nearly caught up by the mastery lesson. LearnPF has now worked with 40+ schools, and counting.

What LearnPF does

LearnPF gives secondary schools everything they need to teach math through Productive Failure: the lessons, an AI tutor trained for them, practice that adapts to each student, and the analytics teachers plan from.

Students explore a problem before they’re taught the method, and our PF-trained AI asks them to explain their thinking as they go. The lesson then connects their attempts to the concept and method, adaptive practice closes the gaps that remain and takes students on to unfamiliar problems, and teachers see what to teach next.

What makes LearnPF different

Most AI tools hand students the answer. LearnPF is built to keep them thinking.

Who is LearnPF for

• Secondary schools, where we work closely to confirm the lessons available for each school’s year groups before it starts.
• Math teachers, who get ready-to-run lessons and class analytics that show who needs help and what to revisit.
• Students, who try math problems before they’re taught the method, with our PF-trained AI guiding them. They can use LearnPF through their school, but learners can also sign up on their own.
• Parents, who can sign their child up as an individual learner.