Roberto Cipriani is a McGill University graduate and a co-founder of Paper. He and Philip Cutler, who also studied at McGill, started the company in Montreal in 2014 under the name GradeSlam.
The idea was on-demand help. Students would message a tutor through a chat window with no travel and no scheduling.
Growth came with pandemic-era school relief funding in the United States. By June 2021 Paper had over 1m students, 1,000 tutors and 130 staff. It was ranked 21st fastest-growing company in Canada in 2020.
In 2022 it bought Figure Math, and in 2023 it bought MajorClarity and Readlee. That year a New Mexico contract was cancelled and school funding fell, and Paper cut staff, including 45% of its headquarters team.