Getting a startup off the ground is hard. That's one of the reasons Compose exists - to relieve startups of the hassles of building a database platform and instead let them focus on building their business. Getting an educational startup off the ground is even harder. It's more important than ever that education gets the best technology and the best technology comes from a healthy, competitive ecology of companies.

At Compose we want to see more of that because better education makes for a better society for all. That's also the reason why we have started to support companies in the Imagine K12 startup accelerator by offering them credits to use on Compose-hosted databases.

We've already seen Imagine K12 funded startups make use of the offer. Take TeachMe Inc, who've been developing math games to power math learning. They spent three months in Silicon Valley as part of the Imagine K12 startup accelerator working with educators to refine the fit of their attention-based approach to education. There's a whole range of skill sets that need to be brought to bear when creating educational games – creating math questions with useful right, wrong and dynamic answers, creating visual representations of those questions, creating games based on those questions and visuals – all of these have to come together and then be delivered on the home and school room devices that are out there.

With that much effort needed to develop their product, anything that can relieve the load is welcome. That's where Compose comes in for TeachMe Inc as it has provided a prototyping platform and then a flexible, elastic production and staging platform using MongoDB. TeachMe's Rhys Jones thought their positive experience of MongoDB was an anomaly when talking to other startups who told him that they'd had various problems with MongoDB. Then he met another CTO who hadn't had any problems, and it turned out that they also used Compose.

Compose helps startups like TeachMe Inc by relieving them of the work needed to get a good reliable database online, by taking care of the backups and making sure they are retained safely, by having quick support and an easy to budget for cost effective pricing model. That lets TeachMe.com get on with building out their Math Games site. So far, they've got 1200 different ways to test math skills and 1.5 million questions behind those tests.

TeachMe Inc says they have boosted an average student's number of questions answered from 55 in a sitting up to over 350 when playing the math-centric games. With that kind of increase, you know that they are improving education and they can keep doing it as Compose's database scales with them... with 250,000 questions answered a day, it's good news for TeachMe Inc because they don't have to worry about their databases even as they grow.

That means more students get exposed to better learning experiences and better education. And that's why we support Imagine K12 startups, because we know they can make a real difference and we are all about making a real difference at Compose.