Since its launch in 2020, Tools Competition winners have reached nearly 50 million learners and educators.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Tools Competition – the world’s largest ed tech competition – made more than $3 million in prizes today to teams developing or expanding learning tools and platforms that promise to transform education and enhance student engagement worldwide.
The Tools Competition is an annual multi-million dollar funding opportunity for ed tech innovations using digital technology, big data, and learning science to meet the urgent needs of learners worldwide. In all, 20 winners from eight countries will receive more than $3 million in funding to reach over one million learners and educators around the globe by the end of 2025.
The Tools Competition is a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, organized by The Learning Agency, and made possible through the generous support of the Walton Family Foundation, Griffin Catalyst, Axim Collaborative, Oak Foundation, and Calbright College.
Notable ideas receiving prizes today include:
- Sway: A new chat platform for college students that will facilitate constructive conversations between students with differing moral, social, and political points of view.
- Journify Learning: An AI-powered platform for special education teachers that tracks student progress, legal compliance, and generates personalized instruction activities.
- Hunu: A special needs education platform that facilitates collaboration between behavior therapists, parents, and teachers to improve the learning outcomes of children with learning and behavior challenges like autism and ADHD in Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Sing and Speak 4 Kids: A music-driven online program for children aged 2-8 with speech delays, using gamified learning to enhance speech articulation, vocabulary, and social communication.
- CourseWise: A platform that modernizes higher education transfer by helping institutions identify course equivalencies, manage articulation workflows, and improve credit acceptance and mobility at scale.
- The BLAST Children Bilingual Speech Dataset: A dataset of bilingual speech data from K-5 students that will better support bilingual and multilingual learners.
A complete list of winners can be found here.
According to a recent survey, nearly half of educators feel that new AI-powered tools are not easy to integrate into their instruction. Each of the 2025 Tools Competition winners has been designed with the needs of teachers and students in mind to ensure teachers can effectively use tools in the areas where they see the most potential for impact.
“We’re witnessing a pivotal moment in ed tech. These tools don’t just digitize old methods – they help us reimagine education itself,” said Kumar Garg, President, Renaissance Philanthropy. “From AI that helps special education teachers navigate complex compliance while personalizing instruction, to platforms that turn difficult conversations into learning opportunities, we’re seeing learning engineering at its best: innovation that expands opportunity rather than just serving the privileged few.”
The 2025 competition included prizes in three tracks:
This competition cycle also introduced two new priorities: encouraging the development of tools that generate public assets and those designed to support students with learning differences. These priorities reflect a growing need for shared, openly available resources to advance AI in education and to promote inclusive solutions that address diverse learning needs. The competition emphasized the importance of developing safe, trustworthy tools and underscored the responsibility developers have to protect their users.
This is the fifth cycle of the Tools Competition. To date, the competition has awarded more than $20 million to 150 ed tech innovators that are reaching nearly 50 million learners and educators worldwide.
The next cycle will launch in September 2025. To learn more, join the mailing list here.
Background
The Tools Competition is the largest ed tech competition in the world. It spurs innovation in digital technology, big data, and learning science to meet the urgent needs of learners worldwide.
The Tools Competition is a program of Renaissance Philanthropy, organized by The Learning Agency, and made possible through the generous support of the Walton Family Foundation, Griffin Catalyst, Axim Collaborative, Oak Foundation, and Calbright College.
The competition is run in partnership with the University of Minnesota and Digital Harbor Foundation.
