Education claims to be universal, but the reality is that many learners are left out of the classroom by income, language, location, or technology and connectivity. General learning and training materials assume a shared first language, a standard pace, and traditional ways of processing information, and learners who fall outside those assumptions often face barriers of access regardless of ability.

The academics at female-founded EdTech company ProfessorMe have plugged this gap with a learning and development platform, powered by cutting-edge content conversion  and aimed at revolutionising learning and teaching, and training.

Professor Dynamo is a game-changing live conversational avatar professor that meets learner demand for round-the-clock, personalised and individualised learning and training in any of 175 languages. It is tireless, never judges and is always on hand to help learners whatever their circumstances.

The Edinburgh-based start-up is the brainchild of former academic Dr Kate Smith, CEO, and co-founder and daughter, Daisy McConville. Kate saw firsthand the impact on students and university staff of increasing demand for help with issues related to academic success. She realised that many students were not attending or not fully engaging with programmes because of external factors such as access or other commitments.

The award-winning start-up’s social impact mission is to rollout Professor Dynamo to companies, universities and NGOs, to help all learners and improve educational and training outcomes. Education claims to be universal, but in reality, many learners are left out of the classroom by income, language, location, or technology and connectivity. General learning materials assume a shared first language, a standard pace, and a singular way of processing information, and for the learners who fall outside of those assumptions, the barrier is not ability but access. This is the very problem former academic Dr Kate Smith set out to tackle when she co-founded ProfessorMe with her daughter Daisy McConville.  

ProfessorMe is an AI platform built on one conviction: "people learn best in their chosen language." Today it teaches in 175 languages and adapts to how each learner actually learns using a live conversational avatar Professor Dynamo.  It is tireless, never judges and is always on hand to help learners whatever their circumstances. 

Key support for ProfessorMe came from the AI Accelerator (AIA) at the University of Edinburgh's Bayes Centre and its business support ecosystem. The AIA advises on commercial strategy, investment and institutions, and has a network to match the company's ambitions.  

AIA is a cohort-based programme that helps AI startups scale, joining Cohort 8 with a near-total commitment: "We almost had 100% attendance… we were keen to draw everything we could from the wonderful experience." 

The idea, as Dr Smith reveals, began close to home. Kate's daughter, and the company’s Chief Product Officer, Daisy McConville, is dyslexic alongside a strong artistic talent. When Daisy completed a Master's project on inclusive learning and teaching at the University of Edinburgh, the two began talking about whether AI technology can support a learner-centred approach that improves accessibility and inclusion.  And the answer became a business and a platform built around neuro-inclusivity from the outset. 

Two engines now power the platform. One rapidly ingests and converts content, and the other delivers teaching and training in almost any language Professor Dynamo came first, launching in January 2025 at the Bayes Centre. It delivers teaching and training at scale to thousands of learners at once, works in low-bandwidth areas, and does so in whichever language the learner prefers. BabbleMouth followed in June 2026 and converts a single prompt, or a PDF or old presentations into interactive videos, podcasts, or full courses. 

Kate is unequivocal about where it stands in the market, "we believe it is unrivalled in the world."

It answers a challenge Kate has seen throughout her career as an educator: learners disengaging with the materials, not because of a lack in potential, but because the materials were never built with them in mind. The Bayes community helped power part of that solution too: in a separate project from the Accelerator, an Interface voucher funded EPCC's work on the platform's lip-syncing technology, Verbaliser. 

The AI Accelerator, she says, reshapes the business at a formative stage. Beyond one-to-one mentoring, masterclasses, and pitch training, it gives ProfessorMe something more lasting: a base, a home. The company works from the Bayes Centre and shares the building with two organisations at the heart of that community: EPCC, the University's high-performance computing centre, and the Data Lab, Scotland's innovation centre for data and AI. Those neighbours matter: the same Interface voucher brought EPCC's expertise to Verbaliser, while a Data Lab collaboration, backed by a Scottish Government AI adoption grant, built agentic AI into ProfessorMe's own customer service. "It's such a lovely community," Kate reflects, "and it's inspirational."

She is direct about the scale of this impact: with tongue firmly in cheek: "I think it's a bit like dog years. For every month that we spent in the Accelerator, it was like seven years of business experience."

Beyond the practical gains, she points to something harder to quantify: the confidence it gave two founders, and the standing it lent them with investors and grant panels. 

Her advice to founders considering the programme is equally direct: know your weaknesses as well as your strengths and be honest about what the business needs. "Don't just think about your strengths, think about your weaknesses... you've got to think about what you need to boost," she says, adding that the commitment has to be deliberate: "create the space in your busy working life... to give it everything." 

That investment shows in where ProfessorMe stands now: a team that has grown considerably since graduating from the AIA, and a company running an active pipeline across universities, NGOs, and enterprises. As Kate puts it, growth "is a rising tide that lifts all the boats," bringing new roles in Scotland across content, AI, and sales. 

The desire to expand access, not replacing people, shapes how Kate talks about AI more broadly.  When people ask whether AI risks replacing teachers, her answer is emphatic:  "the best educator is a human," and the best form of education, one-to-one tutoring, is a luxury that is not affordable for everyone. AI's role is to democratise that. "That's AI for good," she says, a phrase that could just as easily describe the Bayes Centre's own mission: using AI and data science to solve problems that matter. 

Kate frames ProfessorMe's mission in terms broader than language alone: tackling the "intersectionality of discrimination" that still shapes who gets access to education, from gender to socioeconomic barriers, alongside continued development: with full-body avatars for experiential training next. A belief she has held since before the company existed underpins it all: education is the foundation on which every other social problem depends, and AI, used well, can be a force for good. For a company that began as a conversation between a mother and daughter, that ambition has grown, and it has grown, Kate would say, from a home it never had to look far to find: the Bayes Centre.