For Dominic Bristow, stylus isn’t just a company, it’s a calling.
A former physics teacher turned edtech founder, Dominic knows firsthand the crushing workload that drives 40% of UK teachers to leave the profession within five years. He also knows that innovative technology, used wisely, can rewrite that narrative. With stylus, he’s set out to prove that AI and quality teaching don’t just coexist, they can empower each other.
Now, with £500K in pre-seed funding and growing traction among some of the UK’s most influential school groups, stylus is poised to transform a deeply entrenched problem in education: time-consuming marking of student writing.
Leaving the Classroom and Coming Back in a New Way
Dominic didn’t just stumble into edtech, he burned out of education first.
“I was a secondary school physics teacher, and I left the classroom in no small part because I just couldn’t do any more marking. Too many hours with a red pen.”
That experience of watching the job he loved become unsustainable stuck with him. And even as he moved into commercial and leadership roles in the edtech world, the problem of teacher burnout never left his mind.
So, in 2018, he started tinkering. From a broom cupboard turned makeshift office, half whiteboard, half puppet-storage unit, he began coding a tool to help automate marking. It was designed as a solution, but still yet to be designed for scale—it still relied on freelance teachers and manual processes. “I was the proof. You can’t get teachers to mark outside of school hours. Not consistently. Not when you need them.”
The project went on the shelf until everything changed with generative AI.
When AI Got Good Enough
When ChatGPT-4 and other vision models emerged, Dominic revisited his old database. “I stuck some of the old student scripts into ChatGPT-4V, just to see,” he remembers. “One in five was wrong, but I knew instantly that was just an engineering problem. From that moment, I was back in.”
That experiment lit the spark for what would become LearnCycle, stylus’ AI-powered marking platform.
But Dominic didn’t come at it with Silicon Valley bravado.
“We’re doing this in a devoutly educational way. We’re simulating the actual decision-making process teachers go through when they assess writing, hundreds of little micro-decisions per student.”
That respect for the craft of teaching is baked into the product. LearnCycle isn’t about removing teachers, it’s about removing the time-sink. It marks papers using AI, and then has freelance teachers moderate the results. The goal? Quality feedback at scale, and fewer brilliant teachers leaving the profession.
“Make Teaching Desirable Again”
It’s not just about saving time, it’s about saving teachers.
“In the UK, 40% of teachers leave within five years and 92% of them cite workload as the reason.”
The product launched in January, after a long discovery phase working directly with schools and trusts. The team focused their first release on Key Stage 2 English writing, a smart move that combined both product feasibility and deep customer pain.
“For Year 6 teachers, it’s brutal. You’ve got 30 kids, eight writing pieces per student, and 18 different marking criteria. It adds up to hundreds of hours of marking just to build their writing portfolios.”
Stylus is now helping some of those teachers reclaim over 200 hours a year, nearly 20% of their directed time. Not for jet-skiing or cocktails – Dominic is keen to point out – but for lesson planning, interventions, and the most effective kind of teaching they signed up for in the first place.
“We’re trying to prove what I’ve always believed, that strong staff retention and high standards of feedback can coexist.”
Founder Lessons in Focus
Dominic’s path hasn’t been straight, and that’s exactly why his story resonates.
He bootstrapped the first version of stylus with his own savings. He hired slowly and brought in trusted collaborators from past ventures. When the technology finally caught up with his vision, he pivoted hard from science assessments to English writing, because that’s where the clearest, most universal pain point was.
“When you work in schools, every school is different and every school is the same. Year 6 writing is a pain point everywhere. That’s why we started there.”
He’s not chasing scale at any cost, either. The company has been intentionally throttling school onboarding to fine-tune product accuracy and operational workflows. “We’re still using teachers to moderate a lot of the AI output. Every fortnight since September, our accuracy metrics have gone up. That’s the metric I’m most proud of.”
Backing the Mission
In 2024, Stylus raised £500K in pre-seed funding from AI-focused VC firm Sure Valley Ventures. With that support, they’re now gearing up for infrastructure growth, product refinement, and a larger rollout later this year.
But for Dominic, it’s still about mission over money.
“We’re not just here to sell software. We’re here to build something that helps schools keep the great teachers they already have.”
Advice to Fellow Founders
When asked what advice he’d give someone thinking about starting a company, Dominic doesn’t hesitate:
“Just start walking. There are so many people who say they almost started something. And when you ask why they didn’t, it’s always the same answer: ‘It’s a lot of work, isn’t it?’ Well, yeah. It is. But that’s the deal. Don’t stare at the mountain. Just take the first step.”
He laughs, comparing it to the mountaineer in Touching the Void, who had to crawl hundreds of kilometres one metre at a time after breaking his leg. “It’s not a nice analogy, but it’s real. Just do the first metre. Then the next.”
Final Word
Dominic Bristow didn’t just identify a broken system, he built a way to fix it. Stylus isn’t a typical edtech startup. It’s the result of lived experience, deep empathy, and a founder who understands both the classroom and the code.
He’s paying it forward now, not just through product, but through story. And for any wantrepreneur still on the sidelines but with a sight of a problem they know deeply, his message is clear:
Start walking.