Highland district, 63 schools
A district with 9 hours of weekly grid power moved its entire grade 4–8 math sequence onto Hearth Hubs. Teachers used mastery heatmaps to re-group students weekly.
+31% mastery on national assessment, one school year2.6 billion people still live beyond reliable connectivity. Our content packs, mesh sync protocol, and rugged classroom hardware deliver a full modern curriculum with zero bars of signal — and quietly catch up the moment any device touches the network.
Working alongside
you'd teach this many students yearly. Type a gift amount — or anything else that feels like a number.
Modeled at $8 per learner-year of packed curriculum, hub time, and teacher tools.
Untether operationalizes a stakeholder-centric, mission-velocity flywheel that compounds learning equity across the last mile — because the future of education is human-first, signal-optional, and radically scalable.
We de-risk ambiguity by aligning cross-functional pods against North-Star metrics, unlocking asymmetric upside for every stakeholder in the value chain.
Our closed-loop feedback architecture converts field signal into actionable insight, driving durable, defensible, community-owned outcomes at planetary scale.
Every workstream ladders up to measurable impact KPIs, ensuring our growth motion stays ruthlessly outcome-aligned and vanity-metric-free.
We democratize best-in-class pedagogy through a low-lift, high-trust delivery layer engineered for zero-connectivity, high-dignity learning journeys.
Impact is not an event; it's a flywheel. We reinvest learnings into the next iteration, compounding equity gains quarter over quarter.
We think from first principles, move with founder-grade urgency, and hold ourselves accountable to a bias-for-action, learner-obsessed culture.
EdTech quietly assumes broadband. Where that assumption fails, learning platforms fail with it — silently, and at enormous scale.
The entire platform is designed around one rule: the network is a bonus, never a dependency.
Educators assemble Content Packs — versioned, compressed bundles of lessons, video, exercises, and assessments. A full K-12 year in 3 languages fits in under 48 GB. Packs are signed, deduplicated at the block level, and diffable, so an update ships only what changed.
A Hearth Hub — our solar-tolerant classroom server — broadcasts the pack over local Wi-Fi to any device: donated tablets, teachers' phones, or our e-ink readers. No accounts, no app stores, no SIM cards. A classroom is live 20 minutes after unboxing.
Progress, assessments, and teacher notes queue locally. When any device in the mesh touches connectivity — a teacher visiting town, a bus with a hub driving past — the whole classroom's data rides along, encrypted, in kilobytes. We call it sneakernet with manners.
Open-format (ZIM, xAPI, EPUB, H5P) bundles with block-level dedup. Ministries and NGOs can author their own; our tooling validates, compresses, and signs them.
Hubs within radio range form a self-healing mesh and gossip pack updates and progress data peer-to-peer. One connected hub eventually updates an entire district.
Hearth Hub idles at 4 W, runs 14+ hours on its internal battery, and charges from solar, grid, or a motorcycle battery. E-ink readers last 3 weeks per charge.
Our spaced-repetition and mastery engine runs entirely locally — a 40 MB model, not a cloud API. Learners get a personalized path with zero connectivity.
Attendance, mastery heatmaps, and at-risk flags computed on the hub itself. Teachers see this on any browser on the local network — no login wall in front of a lesson, ever.
Learner data is pseudonymous, encrypted at rest, and never leaves the region's designated sync server. The default state of all data is: it stays in the classroom.
Full UI and core curriculum localization, including right-to-left scripts and audio-first modes for early or low-literacy readers.
Timed tests with local integrity checks; results are cryptographically timestamped so certifications remain valid even when submitted weeks later.
Standard screws, socketed storage, published schematics, and a spare-parts kit in every district shipment. Median field repair time: 11 minutes.
Offline-first is not a feature flag. It's a different set of physics. Here is how we handle them.
Packs are content-addressed Merkle DAGs. A device advertises its root hashes; peers respond with only missing blocks. A typical monthly curriculum update transfers ~140 MB instead of re-shipping 48 GB. Transfers resume mid-block after power loss.
Learner progress is modeled as CRDTs (grow-only sets for completions, LWW-registers for preferences, PN-counters for attempt tallies), so weeks-divergent devices merge deterministically with no server arbitration and no lost work.
The sync daemon treats every channel as a courier: Wi-Fi Direct, hub-to-hub 900 MHz radio, USB drives (yes, really — signed and verified), and finally the internet if it appears. Priority queues put assessment results ahead of telemetry, always.
Flash on cheap devices lies about writes. We journal everything, checksum every block on read, and keep 2 rotating pack generations so a corrupt update can never brick a classroom mid-semester.
| Idle / peak draw | 4 W / 11 W |
| Internal battery | 14 h continuous teaching |
| Storage | 2 TB (socketed, mirrored) |
| Concurrent devices | 120 over local Wi-Fi |
| Mesh radio range | 1.8 km line-of-sight (900 MHz) |
| Operating temp | −10 °C to 55 °C, dust-sealed |
| Cold boot to serving | 34 seconds |
| Field-replaceable parts | 9 (screwdriver included) |
A district with 9 hours of weekly grid power moved its entire grade 4–8 math sequence onto Hearth Hubs. Teachers used mastery heatmaps to re-group students weekly.
+31% mastery on national assessment, one school yearTwelve motorcycle librarians carry pocket hubs between 47 villages. Each stop syncs the village mesh in under 4 minutes while books are exchanged.
38,000 learners reached with zero fixed infrastructureCertification continuity across borders: assessments taken offline were cryptographically timestamped and honored by the receiving country's ministry.
4,100 certificates issued that survived a border crossingHardware at cost + a flat per-classroom platform fee. No per-seat pricing — counting seats punishes exactly the classrooms we exist for.
Former rural teachers, mesh-network engineers, and one person who has personally repaired 212 hubs.
No. Packs are versioned and delta-synced: when any device in a mesh touches connectivity, only changed blocks propagate outward — typically ~140 MB for a monthly full-curriculum update. A district's most remote classroom is usually current within two weeks of an update, with no one doing anything on purpose.
Anything with a browser: donated tablets, shared family phones, school desktops. The hub serves everything over local Wi-Fi. For device-poor classrooms we supply e-ink readers with 3-week battery life at cost.
Assessment results are hashed and timestamped on-device against the hub's secure clock, then countersigned when they eventually reach the regional sync server. The certificate is verifiable from the paper printout alone — a QR code contains the signed proof.
The school, then the ministry — never us. Data is pseudonymous by default, stays on regional infrastructure, and every hub has a one-button full export in open formats. Our contracts forbid us from monetizing learner data, and our architecture makes it mostly impossible anyway.
Nine parts are field-replaceable with the included screwdriver, guided by an illustrated repair booklet (and an offline video series on the hub itself — which mirrors to neighboring hubs, so the repair guide survives the failure it documents). Median field repair: 11 minutes.
The sync protocol, pack format, and hardware schematics are published. The adaptive-learning engine is source-available for ministries and auditors. We think infrastructure for public education should be inspectable by the public that depends on it.
The fastest link in many districts has a top speed of 40 km/h and stops for lunch. Design for it.
Jul 2026 · HardwareEvery design review starts with the same question: what does this cost in sunlight?
Jun 2026 · ResearchMastery data from devices that sync monthly turns out to be a beautiful natural experiment.
Pilots are free, take one shipment and one afternoon, and come with a human who answers email slowly but thoroughly (they are often offline too).
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