Paper began with a different name: GradeSlam. Philip Cutler and Roberto Cipriani, both McGill graduates, started it in Montreal in 2014 as a way to get students help with their schoolwork on demand. The name sounded like a student project, and for a while that is what it was.
The idea was simple and appealing. Students would message a tutor through a chat window, not wait for an appointment. No travel, no scheduling. The company later became Paper and pushed that model into schools.
What nobody inside the boom wanted to look at was the model underneath.
The turning point was the pandemic. When classrooms emptied in 2020, school districts in the United States suddenly had federal relief money and a hole where after-school help used to be. Paper was ready. It ranked 21st on a list of Canada's fastest-growing companies in 2020, and by June 2021 it reported more than one million students using the platform, with about 1,000 tutors and 130 staff.
Growth brought acquisitions: Figure Math in 2022, then MajorClarity and Readlee in 2023. The company had raised roughly US$389.6 million from investors by 2023. It was a long way from GradeSlam.
What nobody inside the boom wanted to look at was the model underneath. Reporting later described a chat-based service in which tutors often worked with several students at once. Company records cited in that reporting showed tutors spent about 45% of their time with two or more students, and tutors were paid more for handling four or more simultaneously. That sits uneasily next to a promise of one-on-one tutoring.
Then the money changed. Pandemic funding to districts shrank, and revenue and bookings fell short of expectations. In 2023 officials in New Mexico cancelled a contract after concluding the services were not giving students adequate academic help. Layoffs followed. Reports said 45% of headquarters staff were let go and Canadian tutors were dismissed.
It is a hard ending to a story that began in good faith, with two classmates and a chat box. The sharpest lesson for founders is that a boom funded by a single source of public money can hide whether the product itself works. When relief spending stopped, the question that remained was whether students were being helped, and the company had to answer it in public.