About
Why this exists.
Founder
Howard Kim · Founder & CEO
Cambridge HSPS · IB Year 13 alumnus · ex-tutor
Chak Hang (Howard) Chan read Human, Social & Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He built ElevateOS after four years tutoring IB students in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and watching the same problem appear in every household.
I started tutoring at 19. By the third family I'd noticed the pattern: the parents who paid the most knew the least about what was happening, and the parents who knew the most exhausted themselves chasing updates the tutor never had time to write.
It looked like a communication problem. It wasn't. It was a structure problem.
A typical tutor delivers four to six sessions a week and is paid to teach, not to write. When the parent asks “how is she doing?”, the honest answer takes thirty minutes to compose. So tutors either skip it, send something useless (“good session today!”), or rely on the family to ask better questions. None of that scales. None of that survives a family with three children, two careers, and a child applying to university next year.
The agencies have the same problem one layer up. A senior counsellor at a Hong Kong admissions firm — someone whose judgement parents are paying $10,000 a year for — was spending Sunday evening retyping tutor notes into something readable. That isn't where her judgement should live.
Our purpose
Make execution visible. Make the tutor's work, the counsellor's judgement, and the student's progress legible to everyone who's paying attention — without anyone retyping anything on a Sunday.
The credential side
I read Human, Social & Political Sciences at Cambridge. I mention this because the system isn't built from the technology end — it's built from what social-science research methods taught me about measurement, attribution, and consent. Specifically: that what you measure changes what people do, that surveillance without disclosure is malpractice, and that the audit trail matters because reasonable people disagree about what was said.
Those three principles are why ElevateOS doesn't record session video, doesn't gamify, and time-stamps every edit. They aren't features. They're the load-bearing wall.
Credentials
- University of Cambridge, Human, Social & Political Sciences
- Four years tutoring IB students in Tokyo and Hong Kong
- Founder Institute Vision Sprint 2026
What we're not
We are not Crimson. We are not Blend. We are not an admissions consultancy. We're the infrastructure layer underneath those agencies — the system the senior counsellor reaches for so she can do the work she's actually paid to do. Crimson sells a service. We sell the operating system that service runs on.
We are also not an AI tutor. The tutor is the tutor. The model drafts; the human teaches and signs. If you're looking for a chatbot that replaces tuition, you should look elsewhere — and we'll wish you well.
Where we are
- Founded
- January 2026
- Live route
- elevateos.org
- Pilot families
- ~80, Tokyo / HK / London
- Pilot schools
- 14 international, in conversation
- Programme
- Founder Institute Vision Sprint 2026
- Headquartered
- Cambridge, UK · Hong Kong
Why now
Three things changed in the last 18 months: the cost of drafting a parent-ready paragraph from structured signals dropped to near-zero, the legal posture around student data in international schools tightened (FERPA enforcement, PDPA in Singapore, GDPR scrutiny), and a generation of families that lived through pandemic-era remote learning started demanding visibility as a baseline, not a premium.
Those three trends only intersect once. We're building at the intersection.
Yours,
Howard
[email protected] · For tutors, counsellors, and curious parents — write directly.