Kortext Buys the Study Tool Already Inside Campus Software

Kortext has bought StudyStash, the adaptive study tool already plugged into Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle at more than 160 campuses. Ben Ward, 23, and Jonathan Graham, 24, built it from their own lecture notes at the University of Birmingham and graduated in July 2025. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Half of those campuses are already in the United States, and the pair are heading to Silicon Valley to keep running StudyStash as a separate brand. The buyer is not adding a revision app so much as a live feed of where students stall, sitting inside the software universities already use to teach.

What Kortext Gets in the StudyStash Deal

StudyStash takes the files a lecturer already posts and turns them into study tools that change as a student works. Weak topics get more questions. Strong ones recede. Lecturers and student-success teams see where a cohort is stuck, which is the piece that sits closest to Kortext’s own analytics products.

The company sells that loop as a plug-in, not a new classroom. It works beside Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle, or on its own. Ward, who remains chief executive, said the pair were early with learning-assistant chatbots that also gave campuses a tighter record of how students actually studied. Graham, who remains chief technology officer, put the same idea in plainer terms.

“It zeroes in on concepts that you are struggling with,” Graham said. Over time the software quizzes understanding rather than letting a student reread a summary until it feels familiar.

WHAT THE TOOL BUILDS FROM A COURSE FILE

• Study cards: Personalised flashcards drawn from the lecturer’s own material, not a generic open-web dump.
• Practice tests: Formative quizzes that move with the student’s error rate and mark themselves.
• Audio recaps: Podcast-style versions of the same course content for revision off the page.
• StudyChat: A tutor bot that answers from those instructor files, with the company pitching guardrails against generic chatbot drift.

The University of Birmingham was the first paying campus. The roster now spans the UK, Europe, the United States and Africa, and the company says tens of thousands of students use it. Kortext founder and chief executive James Gray said the purchase extends the group further into teaching and learning workflows, which is the language of a vendor that already sells content, reading lists and engagement scores and now wants the study session itself.

Cards, Tests, Podcasts and a Guardrailed Tutor

StudyStash’s public pitch is that generic chatbots are the wrong tool for a module, because they are not tied to the reading list. Its own bot, StudyChat, is meant to stay inside the instructor’s materials, then write and mark extra practice. Faculty reports sit on top of that activity, so a department can see the sticky topics without waiting for the exam board.

The firm also claims the design follows spaced repetition, interleaved testing and other standard learning-science tricks. That is marketing language. The only numbered campus study it publishes is a 2025 Birmingham run.

BIRMINGHAM PILOT, 2025

• Sample: A Birmingham survey of 2,192 students is the source for the three figures below.
• Grades: 59% of students said StudyStash helped their academic performance.
• Confidence: 74% said they felt more confident managing their study workload.
• Time on task: 34% used it regularly outside class, for an average of 3 hours 20 mins a week.

Those are self-reports, not controlled grade lifts, and the company does not publish a matched exam-score table beside them. They were still enough, Graham said, to show campuses lower drop-out signals and grade movement in trials, which helped procurement teams justify a buy.

Prof. Matthew Leeke, deputy pro-vice-chancellor for student experience at Birmingham, has already used the tool beyond the survey window.

StudyStash has helped our teams to deliver consistent, high-quality teaching at scale. It’s made a real difference in supporting students arriving from overseas, giving them the confidence to fully engage with modules throughout their transition to university.

Prof. Matthew Leeke, Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Student Experience), University of Birmingham

Kortext Spent Four Years Buying the Loop

Kortext started in 2013 as a digital-textbook supplier under Gray. Its own site now says it serves more than three million users at over five thousand institutions, with AI-powered content discovery, study products and learner analytics in the same brochure. The StudyStash deal is the latest add-on in a short run of buys that all point at the same classroom stack.

KORTEXT’S ADD-ONS SINCE 2022

Almost a year before this sale, Gray welcomed Talis by talking about data and AI built with Microsoft, and about a seamless path through library workflows. Talis remains a reading-list product. StudyStash is the student-facing half of the same course: the bit that watches who is actually learning the list.

Kortext was already putting its own assistant into the same virtual learning environments. On 10 August 2026 it said Kortext IQ, an AI reading and study app grounded in approved course content, had become a Moodle Certified Integration in August. That was about seven weeks before the StudyStash announcement. Buying a specialist that already talks to Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle is a faster way to thicken that layer than writing another tutor bot in-house.

Why Half the Roster Is Already American

Half of StudyStash’s customers are already in the United States, which is the cleanest reason the founders are relocating. Named US users include California State University, Minnesota State and Colorado State, plus a partnership with California’s community college system. The UK side came first, with St Mary’s University in Twickenham, Loughborough University and City St George’s among the early adopters, before the software moved overseas. The University of Oulu and RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences sit on the European and African side of the same list.

The US push also runs through EAB, a consultancy that works with more than 2,800 higher-education institutions. Gary Guadagnolo, EAB’s senior research director, is quoted on StudyStash’s own site as telling the founders their offer was not even on most campuses’ AI lists. That is a sales compliment, and it is also a map: the independent tool had a product, and Kortext has the campus contracts.

Eastern Washington University put a more ordinary version of the same pitch on record in April 2026. A pilot on Canvas was running in mathematics and chemistry, with around 1,000 students eligible and 20 faculty already testing it. Gina Gendusa, the university’s director of student success and degree completion, said the software gave students another way to see where they were doing well and where they needed help. That is the weakness map in a single department, not a headline about 160 campuses.

StudyStash says the product supports students in 121 languages, which is a US community-college problem as much as a Birmingham one. The advisory board still carries senior names from UCL, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. The customer mix does not. Once half the roster is American, Silicon Valley is a sales territory, not a gap year.

A Year Out of Birmingham, Then a Sale

Ward and Graham met in the first week of their undergraduate degree in 2021, living near each other in Birmingham’s Vale Village, and later shared a PwC technology degree apprenticeship. They built the first version while revising for second-year computer science exams, then forced their way into the Elevate incubator at Birmingham, a scheme normally kept for graduates. Birmingham became the first customer. They went full time on the company after graduating in July 2025.

FROM COURSE NOTES TO A SALE

1. 2021: Ward and Graham meet in their first undergraduate week at Birmingham.
2. 2023: They join Elevate at the end of their second year and turn revision notes into a company.
3. October 2024: Birmingham runs a university-wide education project on the tool and names the pair as student founders.
4. July 2025: They graduate and work on StudyStash full time.
5. Summer 2025: Eight angel investors, including three San Francisco-based Birmingham alumni, put in an undisclosed sum with a right to equity at a later raise or sale.
6. April 2026: Eastern Washington University starts a Canvas pilot in maths and chemistry.
7. 2 October 2026: Kortext announces it has bought the company; Ward and Graham stay in post and prepare to work from Silicon Valley.

To sell into universities they needed a security badge. They applied for and received the ISO 27001 information security standard in six weeks, and they run the large language models they call through Microsoft Azure. The company has a team of 10. In a year of trading it went from one campus to more than 160. Ward said they had raised equity, broken into the US market, and could now use Kortext to take the product further.

“We’ve proven we can build, sell and scale and now Kortext gives us the reach to drive StudyStash to reach its full potential,” he said.

Lecturers Now See Where the Class Is Stuck

The student-facing half is easy to describe, because it looks like every other study pack: cards, tests, a bot. The campus-facing half is why a textbook group writes a cheque. Faculty dashboards turn private revision into a departmental signal. A lecturer can change the next seminar. A student-success team can see who has gone quiet. That is the same job Kortext stream already claims on engagement data, now fed by actual study behaviour rather than logins and library swipes.

Graham said the hard part, at the start, was faculty, not students. “It’s a bit of a land grab now but when we first started universities were very hesitant to adopt AI, especially faculty. That has come around,” he said. The hesitation was about accuracy, cheating and whose material the bot was using. StudyStash’s answer is to ground the bot in the instructor’s files and hand the heat map back to the instructor. Kortext’s answer, in Gray’s line, is tools campuses can trust.

Trust, in this market, is a procurement word. It means the assistant stays inside approved content, the vendor will take a security audit, and the university still owns the course. It does not settle what happens when a parent company also sells the e-textbooks, the reading list and the engagement score. StudyStash will keep its own brand. The data path now runs into a group that already sits across those other layers.

The Sales Force StudyStash Did Not Have

Ward was blunt about why the offer won. “We have a killer product but we don’t have the distribution,” he said. “For us personally to have an exit under our belt at 23, 24 years old and have very happy investors made sense. We have lots and lots of other businesses in us.” On the day of the announcement he also said the deal gives StudyStash the reach to get to 1,000+ universities. That is a target, not a count Kortext has already handed them.

StudyStash brings powerful capabilities that complement our existing strengths and accelerate our AI strategy, while extending our reach further into teaching and learning workflows. Together, we will help institutions embrace AI responsibly, support educators more effectively, and create richer, more personalised learning experiences that help students achieve their full potential.

James Gray, founder and CEO, Kortext

Gray is buying time. Kortext IQ was already inside Moodle in August. StudyStash is already inside Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle, with faculty reports attached, and half its campuses are American. Ward remains chief executive, Graham remains chief technology officer, and a team of 10 is heading to Silicon Valley with a parent that already sells into thousands of universities. The brand stays on the door. The study session now sits on Kortext’s side of it.