About
Teachers deserve to be teachers.
We believe the teacher should be the teacher and the student should be the student. Not assistants to a 2006 course platform. Elevante is built for both.
It started with one thing we heard over and over.
A math teacher at a Swedish gymnasium said it plainly over coffee: "I answer the same question 30 times. The student who dares raise their hand gets the answer. Those who don't go home and guess."
We thought: what if the lesson never ended. What if the student could ask about it, after the teacher went home. Not a chatbot that invents — but something that actually remembered what was said.
Two weeks later we had a prototype. Three months later two classes were using it for real. That's how Elevante started.
What we believe
Good software is invisible. It just works.
Most tools sold to schools are about administering learning — not improving it. The teacher logs in, uploads, clicks around. The student logs in, clicks around, can't find anything. That's not what school is for. Elevante should take up as little space as possible — and give back as much time as it can.
AI should remember, not invent.
An AI that answers with confidence when it doesn't know is more dangerous in a classroom than no AI at all. Elevante only answers based on what was actually said in the lesson — with a reference to where and when it was said. If the answer isn't in the material, we say so plainly. That's not a limitation. It's a principle.
Students should ask questions without permission.
Many students don't ask the question they have because it feels too simple, too late, or somehow wrong. They sit quietly and hope they'll understand anyway. That hope is costly. Elevante is there after the lesson, without an audience, without time pressure — and takes the twenty-fifth question about integrals just as seriously as the first.
No two schools are alike.
A school in the north and one in the south have different schedules, different subjects, different ways of talking to their students. Elevante gives them shared infrastructure — but doesn't dictate how they use it. The teacher knows what works in their classroom. We build the tool. They decide what it does.
The teacher is the expert. AI is the assistant.
Elevante doesn't replace any teacher and doesn't try to. The teacher plans, explains and understands their students. We make sure that work doesn't disappear when the lesson ends.
No student should have to borrow notes.
If you missed a lesson, didn't follow along, or simply forgot — you shouldn't depend on someone else having written down the right things. The lesson is still there. It's yours.
Learning doesn't always happen on schedule.
Understanding comes when it comes — sometimes the night before a test, sometimes a week later. Elevante is there then too, not just in the classroom.
Privacy isn't a feature we added. It's how we built everything.
GDPR isn't a checkbox for us. It's a design decision that affects every choice — what we store, for how long, and who gets to see it.
The team
John Guthed
Founder
John is an entrepreneur and consultant in AI and data strategy. He has built the companies We Are Allies and Avail Sthlm, where he helps businesses get their data in order and turn it into better decisions. He went to Swedish upper-secondary school himself and was one of those who constantly missed class — Elevante is the tool he wishes he had had back then.
Stefan Pettersson Noord
Founder
Stefan brings more than three decades in the digital and creative industry. He has founded and led companies such as Otto Stockholm Proximity and Klirr, served as Managing Director of Ogilvy Interactive Sweden, and today runs the innovation company The Innovation Chapel. He started Elevante to point that experience at something that genuinely matters — giving every student the same chance to understand.
Stockholm · Sweden
Everything we do is done here.
We build everything ourselves — no outsourced development, no American model training on Swedish kids' voices. All data is stored in Stockholm (AWS Stockholm + Supabase EU). We speak Swedish and understand what a curriculum is.