About
A New Zealand company for NCEA classrooms
WriteWise started in 2025 with a simple brief: make quality NCEA feedback and learning support available to every student.
Leon Grootscholten, founder
Our story
An idea, then a year in classrooms
I'm Leon Grootscholten, founder of WriteWise, and this is my story.
WriteWise started early in 2025, with an idea and a passion for education. Throughout the year, hundreds of hours were spent consulting students and teachers to refine our product and make it what it is today.
WriteWise quickly gained recognition by winning the 2025 Velocity Ideas challenge, securing a grant that enabled continued development. That early validation helped accelerate our growth, leading to rapid adoption by schools throughout New Zealand and establishing WriteWise as a trusted tool relied on by students across Aotearoa.
What we believe
New Zealand deserves the best of both
New Zealand is a small market. Too often that means schools make do with software built for somewhere else and bent to fit NCEA, or with local tools that understand our context but fall short on quality. We don't think teachers and students should have to choose. New Zealand deserves products that are beautiful and genuinely effective, and built from the ground up for our curriculum, our standards, and our classrooms.
We believe AI can be a force for good in the classroom, when it is used well. It should make students think harder, not less, and help teachers spend their time where it matters most. That is why WriteWise offers feedback and thinking points rather than rewriting the work, and why the teacher still confirms the grade. AI should strengthen learning and teaching, not make any of us lazy.
The same is true of how we build. Used well, AI lets a New Zealand team build products that are more powerful, more relevant, and more appropriate for our context than a market this size would usually get, while raising the quality of the product and the rigour of the engineering behind it. It is not a shortcut. It is how we do the careful work more thoroughly.
Built for how NZ classrooms actually run
Learn, Exams, or both. Talk to us if you want WriteWise in your school.