From the classroom to the cloud: why being shortlisted for EdTech Company of the Year means everything to the Tugo team

Who we are

Tugo was founded in December 2025 by two educators who had spent years watching the same problem play out: the families who could most benefit from high-quality tutoring were the ones least able to access it.

Hugo Harrabin is a PGCE-qualified teacher with six years’ experience in the classroom, including time at Harrow International School. Hugo Cheyne is a school governor and AI learning tool builder who has spent years thinking about how technology can genuinely support teachers and tutors, without replacing the human relationships that make learning stick.

Together, they built Tugo: a small-group online tutoring platform powered by an AI co-pilot, designed to give every student access to the quality of attention previously reserved for those whose families could afford £50 or more per hour for private 1-to-1 tuition.

What we built, and why it matters

The problem we set out to solve sounds straightforward. In practice, it took careful thinking to get right.

Group tutoring is cheaper than 1-to-1, but the traditional trade-off is that the tutor’s attention is divided, and the personalised feedback that makes tutoring valuable gets diluted. AI-only platforms can help, but they rely entirely on the student’s own motivation to engage. The human relationship (the accountability, the encouragement, the moment a tutor spots that a student has understood something incorrectly) turns out to be very hard to automate.

The Tugo AI Co-Pilot sits in the background during sessions, handling work-checking, real-time feedback and assessment. That frees the tutor to focus entirely on the high-leverage moments: explaining misconceptions, building confidence, and keeping students engaged. Every student receives a level of individual attention that matches the quality of 1-to-1 tuition, at a fraction of the cost.

Every session is structured around the Tugo Method, an approach to teaching grounded in cognitive science. Spaced repetition, interleaving and retrieval practice underpin every lesson we run, because these are the techniques with the strongest evidence base for building lasting understanding.

Six months in

Tugo is a young company. We began operating in December 2025, completed our first investment round from angel investors in April 2026, and have been accepted into two leading EdTech accelerator programmes. None of that happened by accident. It has taken a significant amount of work and belief in what we’re building from a team that is still small.

We built our school partnerships by showing up directly: cycling school-to-school, speaking to parents in person, and prioritising schools where a higher proportion of pupils qualify for free school meals. We currently support students across six schools, with more joining in September. We believe quality tutoring should be accessible regardless of postcode or household income.

On the technical side, we invested heavily in making our AI useful rather than useless slop. Early on, AI models fast enough for real-time feedback weren’t accurate enough, and accurate models were too slow. We solved it by building a multi-model rubric system that generates high-accuracy marking criteria for each question, then uses a fast model to assess responses against it. Students get immediate, reliable feedback. Tutors spend more time teaching.

What our partners say

Feedback from our partner tutors has been the clearest signal that what we’re building is working.

“The AI Co-Pilot has genuinely impressed me. Students are having a better quality lesson with a 2x class size thanks to Tugo. It’s given me more time to support the students who are struggling, and the improvement over the past few weeks alone has been remarkable. I’m excited to see where it goes.”

ACE Tuition, partner tutoring company

What this shortlisting means to us

When we heard that Tugo had been shortlisted for EdTech Company of the Year at the UK Business Tech Awards 2026, it was a moment of reflection for the whole team.

We are a small team. We have worked incredibly hard over the past six months to build something we can be proud of: a product that tutors want to use, that students benefit from, and that parents trust. A lot of that work happens quietly: in code, in lesson planning, in school visits, in the unglamorous process of iterating until something is right.

Being shortlisted by an independent panel of judges, alongside other organisations doing serious work in the EdTech sector, validates something that matters to us. It tells us that the problem we’re solving is recognised as significant, and that the approach we’ve taken to solving it stands up to scrutiny beyond our own team.

For Hugo Harrabin, it connects directly to his years in the classroom: “The research shows that when a student gets the right support at the right moment it makes the biggest learning and I’ve seen this first-hand. Building Tugo has been about making that possible for far more students. This recognition is a reminder that we’re on the right track.”

For Hugo Cheyne, it’s about the broader mission: “The technology has always been in service of a straightforward goal: making great tutoring accessible. That’s what we get up for every morning, and it’s why recognition like this means so much.”

What’s next

We are currently working on extending the Tugo AI Co-Pilot to support Science and English tuition, which will allow us to cover the vast majority of subject areas students need. We’re continuing to build our school partnerships, looking at working with charities. And we’re working every day to reach the families who need what we offer most.

The UK Business Tech Awards shortlisting is a milestone we’re proud of. But the work is what drives us, and there is plenty more of it to do.