Our mission
Helping more students become capable, independent problem solvers.
Our story
How we got here.
Sophomore year at Brown, we were thrown together as roommates. We stayed up late talking about math, teaching, and the tools we wished we had had in high school. The first prototype came out of those conversations.
We spent the next summer building a learning platform for college calculus at Brown. It was rough, but it taught us how hard it is to teach math well on a screen — and how much room there was to do it better.
Brown's B-Lab accelerator took us in for the summer. We chose IB Math: James had grown up inside the curriculum, and we both felt it deserved much better materials than existed.
We graduated, raised a small amount of funding, and started on Perplex full-time. Almost everything we thought we knew about content, pedagogy, and software got rebuilt that first year out of school.
We packed up and moved to San Francisco — to be among the people doing the most serious work in software, and to give what we are building the time and focus it deserves.
We give the product a new name and a warmer look. Perplex becomes Dawnbridge — same team, same mission, a clearer identity for what we are building.
What drives us
What we believe.
Great teaching is yours.
Software cannot do the part of teaching that matters, and we are not pretending otherwise. What it can do is shrink the rest — problem sets, marking, diagnostics — so you spend more of your week on the parts that need you.
AI should be used with care.
Artificial intelligence opens up new doors for building tools to serve teachers and impact students. Instant feedback, adaptive support, and actionable insights are just the beginning. But when it comes to learning, the bar for quality should stay high, and we must remain vigilant for the potential negative impacts of AI.
Meet the founders
The whole team.

James Mullen
Co-founder & CEO
Biological Physics, Brown '24
Took IB Further Math, Chemistry, and Physics HL. Runs content and pedagogy.

Quinn Straus
Co-founder & CTO
Math & Computer Science, Brown '24
Took the AP Program. Runs engineering.
We're in this for the long run.
Six years in, we are still the same two people who started this in a Brown dorm room, and we are in no hurry to be anywhere else. We are building the IB Mathematics platform we wish every student today had access to — one feature, one lesson, one teacher at a time.
Want to say hi? Write to james@perplex.org.