Edtech SaaS grows from 1 DevOps engineer to 6 specialists
Brocoders began with AWS scaling for 99math’s math game platform, then added front-end and back-end engineers to its team.
Industry
Edtech
Location
Estonia
Client since
July 2022
Status
Finished
1 to 6
1 DevOps engineer at the start, 6 engineers at the peak
731
skills in 28 topics, grades K to 8 (99math.com, October 2026)
2022
July 2022 to May 2025 with Brocoders
2M+
2 million+ students in the USA (99math LinkedIn page, the client’s own claim)
Client: 99math, ed-tech SaaS company, Estonia. Client contact: Ain Arend, co-founder and CTO.
Picture a classroom at ten past nine. A teacher puts a code on the board, thirty kids type it in, and for the next five minutes the room goes quiet except for the tapping. Then someone shouts that they got the answer first. That is 99math, an ed-tech SaaS company with a live, multiplayer math game that turns a lesson warm-up into a race the whole class wants to win.
It began in Estonia in 2018, and by January 2019 more than 9,000 students from 200 schools had played in a single game day. Today the team says over 2 million students in the USA play it, and many keep playing at home for fun. Teachers get live games, self-paced practice, homework and reports for free. Students get 731 skills across 28 topics, from addition to fractions, decimals and integers, for grades K to 8.
A live game on 99math.com: the teacher's board shows the game code, and the class joins with it.
The class progress report on 99math.com: accuracy by topic and each student's weakest skill.
Ain Arend, the company's co-founder and CTO, describes the goal on LinkedIn as building a platform where millions of kids actually want to do math. In summer 2022 that goal had a deadline: the school year.
Why 99math needed more engineers in summer 2022
A platform that millions of kids want to play has a good problem. Every autumn, school starts and traffic arrives all at once. 99math had a lean team and a long list of things to build, including more math topics than first planned.
In June 2022 a fellow Estonian founder, the team behind Adact, introduced Ain Arend to Brocoders. We had built a gamification platform for Adact, and 99math wanted engineers who could work on their own inside a live product and keep up with the 99math team's pace.
Where we started: DevOps and AWS, ready for the school season
The engagement began with modernizing 99math's AWS setup so it could carry school-season load with room to grow. One DevOps engineer from Brocoders joined the 99math team in July 2022.
The client's review on Clutch, titled “App Development for Ed-Tech SaaS Company”, describes it this way:
“We initially started with just DevOps from BC. Then we got an additional FE developer, and now we have 6 engineers. 3 FE, 2 BE, 1 devops.”
Clutch's summary of the project: Brocoders has supported the development of an app for an ed-tech SaaS company.
New math exercises in the existing Topics API
Next came a front-end developer. 99math already had a Topics API behind its Vue.js teacher side, and the work was to add new kinds of math exercises and new ways to present math tasks to students.
1. Choose the skills
2. Play a live round
3. See who needs help
How a round works on 99math.com: the teacher picks skills from the topics, the class plays, and the report shows who needs help.
From one engineer to a team of six
Once the first two engineers delivered, the team grew in steps. By the autumn season 99math had six Brocoders engineers working as part of the 99math team: three front-end, two back-end and one DevOps. This is the main thing we did for 99math, and it is what our senior engineering pods are built for: engineers placed into a client's own team, in the client's repo, on the client's plan, with the client leading.
The Brocoders team on 99math, autumn 2022
DevOps
engineer
Front-end
developers
Back-end
developers
“They are very well organized, communicate well, and keep deadlines.”
The team was sized to the season and the roadmap. Six engineers at the 2022 peak, a stable core of two from mid 2023, and a short front-end cover in autumn 2024 when the roadmap needed extra hands. In 2025 99math started building its student game in Unity with its own in-house team, and our work was handed over in May 2025. A product team that grows its own engineering capacity is the best outcome a partner can hope for.
What 99math has done since
According to Ain Arend's LinkedIn, 99math moved its student game to Unity and kept the teacher side in Vue. In September 2026 Ain reported almost 17,000 kids playing in a five-minute window.
If your platform is already working and needs more hands before a deadline, Brocoders places senior engineers into your team within weeks and adjusts the size monthly.
