I first came across Synap in 2018, a couple of years after BusinessCloud was founded.
A revision app for students founded by Dr James Gupta and Dr Omair Vaiyani – who had recently graduated from Leeds Medical School – it was already being talked about in regional tech circles.
Fast-forward eight years and the business is going strong – although it looks very different from that early-stage startup.
When I catch up with James in Bruntwood SciTech’s Platform building, next door to Leeds train station, my first question is: was there a pivot?
“We’ve pivoted a couple of times, but we’ve kept the same core idea of bite-sized studying with multiple choice questions,” he tells me.
“We started off as a revision app for students. We used it, other students used it; but when we graduated, we realised how difficult it could be to get students to pay for educational products.
“At the same time, we were getting B2B institutional interest. So the first pivot was to sell this same product into institutions instead of to students. And that started working really well for us.”
Today the firm’s 300-strong customer base consists of a third universities; a third employers and regulated sectors; and a third private EdTech and tutoring companies.
“Our last major pivot was moving from low-stakes to high-stakes exams,” James continues. “As well as the revision tools, we began doing the actual end-point assessments for students.
“We started dabbling with that just before COVID, which was interesting timing because suddenly everyone needed to be able to do remote exams and we had this beta product out. So we leaned quite hard into that – and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last five years.”
No panic
Synap does not generate the content itself, but rather provides the tools for clients to do so. The platform used by students for revision is the same as that which provides secure assessments for institutions, albeit through different modules.
“That’s an advantage for us because if, say, you’re a university and your students are using our low-stakes features like question banks and revision, there’s a natural progression when it comes to exam day.
“They’re not panicking and asking: ‘What’s my login? Does this platform work on my laptop? Where do the buttons go? What are the shortcuts?
“I think we can reduce exam day stress quite a bit, because they’re doing a high-stakes exam, but on a platform that they’re already familiar with.”
One such client is the University of Law. “We are used across all of their campuses. We build up a profile of the students – what their strengths and weaknesses are – and show that to them so they know where to practise.
“We also show it to their tutors so that they know where additional training is needed.”
He adds: “When we started working with them, it was very cool to get a large institution saying; ‘We see something in your idea – we now want you to embed it across our organisation and work with us to design our curriculum around your platform.
“It was a really good confidence boost that someone saw what we saw in the business.”
EdTech 50
Synap, which featured in our 2026 EdTech 50 ranking announced this week, works with some American Ivy League institutions on their admissions exams and in-course assessments. It also has clients in Australia.
Synap – transforming the landscape of online exams and learning
James says the Leeds-headquartered firm, which has employed a ‘steady’ 14 people for the last couple of years, is still operated as an agile startup – but on a big assessment day, its scale gives him a ‘pinch me’ moment.
“When a client delivers 10,000 exams on the same day in a test centre, and it all goes smoothly, that’s because it’s like a military operation,” he says.
“You realise that all of the work that the team’s put into redundancy, scaling the infrastructure and handling technology – like when a student tries to sign on with a 30-year-old version of Windows or something – has paid off.
“We have genuinely built something that does what it says it can do, and is capable of doing that at scale.”
Synap team on a Zoom call
Entrepreneurship
James’ father is a GP while his mother is a nurse who went into management. I ask whether the original plan was to enter the medical profession himself.
“My exposure was to medicine, in a sense, but then also to small business – because GPs obviously work quite differently to hospital doctors,” he answers. “I worked in my dad’s practice for a couple of years before university and really enjoyed it.
“By the time we were looking to graduate, we drafted in my now-wife and my sister to help with Synap. Every day was different and exciting. Nothing could really compete with that.
“So when we graduated, we decided to do this for two years and see what happened. If it failed, we would know that we had gotten it as far as we could and could go back into medicine. But it didn’t fail!
“I’m grateful every day just for how much fun this is. I couldn’t go back to doing medicine now. I’ve just become way too used to working for myself.
“There’s a saying about how ‘successful entrepreneurs often work 80 hours to avoid working 40 hours for someone else’. Every day is a little bit different, a little bit challenging, and can be stressful.
“But even a stressful day here is still really fun.”
Rhythm
The CEO, a self-confessed night owl and music lover, says he really finds his rhythm in the evenings.
“I like EDM (electronic dance music), drum ‘n’ bass, things like that. I love Metallica [as well] but if I put techno on, it’s just instrumental and gives you a steady pulse to work along to,” he says.
“The reason people like that sort of music is because the beat is synced in with their electronic pulses. The 4/4 beat is our natural walking rhythm and our heartbeat. So your brain and your heart are doing the same thing.
“Even if you just create an electronic identical pulse, your brain will still interpret it as a tick-tock pattern. It won’t hear tock, tock; it’ll hear tick-tock, tick-tock.
“It definitely helps with concentration.”
Synap has raised around £700,000 to date from angel investors and Venturion, a Wakefield-based family office.
The firm is profitable and growing, James says, and not currently looking for institutional funding: “We do about £1.5 million a year in revenue at the moment, against £1.1m-1.2m in costs.”
AI
As for future plans, he says it is looking at AI – but will continue to develop tech in-house.
“How can AI be used by our customers to create content from existing materials? Can we use it to mark and grade assessments? How do we prevent students from using AI as part of their essays?” he asks speculatively.
“I’ve used it on proctoring a couple of times – remote invigilation of an exam – but that needs to be done in a GDPR-compliant way. How do we install software on someone’s computer that allows us access to what they’re doing and their webcam, and to record it? Then, how do we review that?
“We’ve always got a strong preference for doing things in-house, because it gives us flexibility; it gives us control over where our data – and our customers’ data – is going; and it gives us end-to-end ownership and responsibility over the outcome.”
@businesscloud.co.uk EdTech 50 judge Rachel Vecht was wowed by this year’s ranking and the growing number of tools to assist with #neurodivergent learning and positive #mentalhealth and #wellbeing. The founder of Educating Matters picks out @myhappymind, Cognassist and @gaialearningonline for particular praise. @educatingmatters ♬ original sound – BusinessCloud