# WhereTheFuture — full fact sheet

> WhereTheFuture lets students visit the future before they live in it — then ship real fixes back to the present.

Source: https://wherethefuture.org. All figures are as of 2026-09 unless dated otherwise.

## Identity

- Brand: WhereTheFuture (short: WTF)
- Tagline: WTF? Where The Future.
- Legal entities: WhereTheFuture Pte. Ltd. (Singapore, headquarters); WhereTheFuture Vietnam Co., Ltd. (Ho Chi Minh City, operations)
- Founded: 2023-03 in Cần Thơ, Vietnam
- Simulation engine: Tide
- North-star metric: Student solutions running in the real world, not minutes in app.

## Boilerplate

WhereTheFuture (WTF) is a venture-backed education company that lets students visit the future before they live in it. In science-grounded simulated worlds called Portals, students take real roles — engineer, farmer, mayor, nurse — and watch the consequences of their choices play out. The best student solutions become funded pilots in real cities. Founded in Cần Thơ, Vietnam, in March 2023, WhereTheFuture is headquartered in Singapore and operates from Ho Chi Minh City, with pilots in Indonesia and the Philippines.

## Insight

The people who will live longest in the future have the least say in it. School teaches about the past; WTF lets students rehearse the future and turns their best answers into real pilots.

## Origin story

- Oct 2022: The floods close a school for 11 days — Lâm Khánh Linh teaches science at a lower-secondary school in Cần Thơ. When the water finally drops and class resumes, the lesson plan feels beside the point.
- Oct 2022: “where the future?” — Võ Ngọc Hân, 13 and in grade 8, types three words into the class chat in broken English. She means: where is our future if the city keeps flooding?
- Oct 2022: A weekend, a crude simulation — Linh and her game-designer friend Pip build Cần Thơ in 2045 over one weekend. The water rises; students play engineers, farmers, and the mayor.
- Dec 2022: The class pitches sponge lanes — The class proposal — sponge-lane rain gardens for the school street — goes to the neighborhood. A 40-second video of the students presenting it spreads online.
- Jan 2023: The first pilot goes in the ground — The neighborhood pilots the rain gardens on the school street. The next heavy rain drains in hours instead of days.
- Feb 2023: Everyone calls it WTF — Students start calling the project “WTF”. The team keeps the typo and the acronym as the brand: grammar mistakes are allowed; giving up on the future is not.
- Mar 2023: WhereTheFuture is incorporated — Đặng Minh Khôi, who built agent-based climate models in research, joins as CTO to turn the weekend prototype into a real simulation engine.

The name comes from a student's typo, "where the future?". Grammar mistakes are allowed; giving up on the future is not.

## Mission, vision, values

- Mission: Give every young person a seat at the table where the future is decided.
- Vision (2035): 100 million students have visited a future and 10,000 of their solutions are running in the real world.

- Go there first: Prototype before you argue. A rough world we can walk through beats a perfect slide deck about one.
- Kids are clients, not users: Students are the people we answer to. We design for their judgment, not their attention span or their screen time.
- Keep the typo: Bold over polished. Our name is a 13-year-old’s grammar mistake, and we would rather ship something brave than something tidy.
- Every future is plural: There is no single right answer to 2045. Portals reward reasoning, trade-offs, and dissent, not guessing what the teacher wants.
- Safety is the floor, not the feature: Child safety is the minimum to be allowed in the room. We never market it, and we never trade it for growth.

## Platform

### Portals
Visit a future world. Take a job in it.

AI-generated, science-grounded future worlds. Students take roles, AI citizens react to every decision, and our simulation engine, Tide, plays out the consequences years ahead. Each Portal maps to the curriculum teachers already have to teach.

- Roles with real trade-offs: engineer, farmer, mayor, nurse, reporter
- AI citizens who remember what you promised them
- Tide simulates flooding, heat, budgets, and public trust over decades
- Mapped to math, science, civics, ethics, and language

### Future Self
Meet yourself at 30.

A guided conversation with a projection of yourself at 30, shaped by the choices you made inside Portals. Built for motivation and career exploration, with strict child-safety guardrails on every turn.

- Grounded in the student’s own Portal choices, not a horoscope
- Career paths explained in plain language, with the trade-offs left in
- Conversation scope limited and reviewed by our Trust & Safety team
- Teachers and parents see summaries, never private transcripts

### Future Passport
Proof of what you can actually do.

A verifiable record of the skills a student earns across Portals: systems thinking, collaboration, data reasoning, and ethics. Universities and employers read it through the Passport API, only with the student’s consent.

- Skills stamped from evidence, not self-reported
- Systems thinking, collaboration, data reasoning, ethics
- Student-owned and consent-based: nothing is shared by default
- Passport API for universities and employers

### Problems Bank
Real problems in. Real pilots out.

Cities, NGOs, and companies post problems they have not solved. We turn each one into a Portal, thousands of students work on it, and the top solutions get funded pilots in the real world.

- Partners post a problem, a budget, and a pilot site
- WTF builds the Portal and runs it across partner schools
- Students pitch; a joint panel picks what gets piloted
- Results are measured and published, including the failures

### Portal Studio (Beta 2026)
Build the future you want to visit.

Students and teachers build and publish their own future worlds with the same tools our world-builders use: maps, roles, AI citizens, and Tide rules.

- Templates for cities, coastlines, hospitals, and schools
- Science-check review before a world is published
- Classroom-only, school-wide, or public publishing

### Portals (future worlds)

- Mekong Delta 2045 — Cần Thơ, Vietnam, 2045. High tides now reach the floating market twice a week, saltwater has crept forty kilometres up the river, and the rice harvest is half what it was. The city has one budget and three plans on the table. Students decide what gets built, what gets moved, and who gets a say — then Tide shows them the delta twenty years on. Roles: Hydraulic engineer, Rice and shrimp farmer, Mayor, Ward health officer, Local reporter. Subjects: Science, Math, Civics, Geography.
- Jakarta Floats — North Jakarta, Indonesia, 2050. The northern coast sinks a few centimetres every year and the sea wall is due for its next raise. Students run a coastal neighborhood that must choose between building higher walls, lifting homes onto floating platforms, or moving inland — and keep the fishing economy, the schools, and the mosque together through the choice. Roles: Coastal planner, Fishing cooperative leader, District head, Groundwater scientist, Youth organizer. Subjects: Science, Math, Civics, Ethics.
- Manila Heat 2040 — Manila, Philippines, 2040. Heat-index days above 45°C now close schools for weeks at a time and the power grid buckles every afternoon. Students redesign a dense barangay for the heat: shade, water, cooling centers, work hours, and school calendars — with a city budget that cannot pay for everything and residents who disagree about what matters most. Roles: Urban designer, Barangay captain, Public-health nurse, Grid operator, Jeepney driver. Subjects: Science, Math, Civics, Language.
- The Hospital Run by AI — Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2038. A district hospital has handed triage, scheduling, and diagnosis support to an AI system. Waiting times have collapsed — and so has trust, after one decision nobody can explain. Students sit on the hospital’s ethics board and decide what the AI may decide alone, what a human must sign, and how patients get to appeal. Roles: Emergency doctor, Patient advocate, AI engineer, Hospital director, Ethics board member. Subjects: Ethics, Science, Math, Language.
- First School on the Moon — Shackleton Crater rim, the Moon, 2058. Twelve families have moved to a research base at the lunar south pole, and their children need a school. Students design it from nothing: what to teach when Earth is three days away, how to ration water and power between classrooms and labs, and which traditions from home are worth the cargo weight. Roles: School principal, Life-support engineer, Teacher, Base commander, Student representative. Subjects: Science, Math, Ethics, Language.

### Safety principles

- Minors’ data is the Council’s call: Any feature that touches minors’ data needs a yes from the Council of 2045. Their veto is binding.
- Collect less: We collect only what a Portal needs to run and a teacher needs to teach. We never sell student data and never use it for advertising.
- Humans review the AI: Every AI citizen and every Future Self conversation runs inside reviewed guardrails, with red-teaming before release and monitoring after.
- Hard topics, handled with care: Portals can be dark — floods, heat, illness — but they are age-banded, never graphic, and always end with something a student can do.
- Escalate to a person: Signs of distress in a conversation route to a trained human and the student’s school, not to another model.

## Commitments

- The 1% Future Pledge: 1% of company equity is held in trust for learners. Distributions fund scholarships and pay royalties to students whose solutions are piloted. If WTF wins, the kids who built it win with us.
- Council of 2045: 9 students aged 14 to 19 hold veto power over any feature that touches minors’ data, and one non-voting observer seat on our board. They have used the veto, and we are better for it.
- Shipped, not graded: Our north-star metric is student solutions running in the real world, not minutes in app. We report it first, every quarter.

## Business model

- School license (Private schools and education departments): An annual per-student license (B2B2C) that covers every Portal, teacher dashboards, curriculum mapping, and training.
- Explorer home plan (Families): A family subscription so students can keep exploring Portals and talking to their Future Self at home, with parent controls built in.
- Partner Portals (Cities, NGOs, and companies): Partners sponsor Problems Bank worlds built around their real, unsolved problems, and fund pilots of the best student answers.
- Passport API (Universities and employers): Paid, consent-based reads of verified skills from a student’s Future Passport.

## Traction (as of 2026-09)

- Students: 68,000 — Learners who have entered at least one Portal.
- Partner schools: 140 — Private schools and public schools under education-department licenses.
- Countries: 3 — Vietnam, with pilots in Indonesia and the Philippines.
- Provinces and cities in Vietnam: 14
- Future hours played: 1.2M — Time students spent inside Portals.
- Student solutions piloted in the real world: 37 — Our north-star metric: shipped, not graded.
- Annual recurring revenue: US$850K
- Net revenue retention: 124%
- Teacher NPS: 71
- Team: 46 — Ho Chi Minh City, Cần Thơ, Hà Nội, and remote.

## Impact: student solutions piloted in the real world

37 student solutions are running in the real world. Selected cases:

- Sponge-lane rain gardens (Cần Thơ, Vietnam, 2023) — Problem: After every heavy rain, the lane outside a lower-secondary school stayed under ankle-deep water for up to two days. Students waded to class, and the school closed whenever the river and the rain arrived together. Solution: A grade-8 class replaced strips of concrete along the lane with sunken rain gardens of gravel, sand, and native grasses, plus kerb cuts that send runoff into them instead of the drain. Pilot partner: Ward-level public works team. Result: Standing water now clears in under two hours. 180 metres of lane converted, zero rain closures in the following wet season, and the design copied by two neighboring streets.
- Tide-timed school bus routes (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2024) — Problem: On king-tide mornings, low streets in the southern districts flood and school buses stall, so hundreds of students arrive an hour late or not at all. Solution: Students mapped which streets flood at which tide height and built a simple rule set that switches each bus to a dry alternative route the night before a high tide. Pilot partner: Private school bus operator. Result: Late arrivals on high-tide days down 38% across 14 routes in the first semester; the operator now runs the rule set for every route it serves.
- Clean-air classroom alerts (Hà Nội, Vietnam, 2024) — Problem: Classrooms kept windows open on the worst air-quality days because nobody knew when to close them, and cheap purifiers ran in empty rooms. Solution: Students designed a traffic-light card system tied to a low-cost sensor in each building, with a student “air monitor” per class responsible for windows, doors, and purifier schedules. Pilot partner: Lower-secondary school network. Result: Indoor fine-particle readings down 31% on alert days across six schools; purifier running hours cut by a quarter.
- Storm-shutter swap (Đà Nẵng, Vietnam, 2024) — Problem: Older homes near the coast lost windows in every strong storm, and families could not afford shutters they would use only a few days a year. Solution: A shared shutter library: students measured windows street by street, a local workshop cut standard-size panels, and households borrow them when a storm warning is issued. Pilot partner: Neighborhood residents’ association. Result: 62 households covered; no window losses among borrowing homes through the storm season, at roughly a fifth of the cost of individual shutters.
- Flood-height markers on every corner (Huế, Vietnam, 2025) — Problem: During floods, families did not know how deep the water would get on their own street, so many waited too long to move motorbikes, rice, and elderly relatives. Solution: Students painted historic flood heights on lamp posts and added a scannable code that shows the forecast water level for that exact corner. Pilot partner: Ward civil-defense volunteers. Result: 120 markers installed across three wards; evacuation drills completed 22% faster, and residents moved belongings a day earlier in the next flood.
- Rooftop rain-catch for school toilets (Jakarta, Indonesia, 2025) — Problem: Schools in North Jakarta pumped groundwater for toilets and cleaning, adding to the land subsidence that floods their own neighborhood. Solution: Students in the Jakarta Floats Portal designed gutters and tanks that feed rooftop rainwater to toilets, with a dashboard showing how much groundwater each school did not pump. Pilot partner: Private school foundation. Result: Groundwater pumping down 45% across three pilot schools in the first rainy season; two more schools have funded their own tanks.
- Cooling-hour school timetable (Manila, Philippines, 2026) — Problem: Afternoon heat made classrooms unbearable during the hot dry season; students fainted, and schools cancelled whole days. Solution: Students rebuilt the day: an earlier start, physical activity moved before 9 a.m., a shaded cooling hour after lunch, and wet towels and water stations at every stairwell. Pilot partner: Barangay health office. Result: Heat-related clinic visits down 52% over April and May at two pilot schools, with no full-day closures.
- Plain-language AI triage explainer (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2026) — Problem: An emergency department used software to order its waiting queue, but patients could not see why others were seen first, and arguments with staff were rising. Solution: Students from The Hospital Run by AI wrote a one-screen explainer for the waiting-room display: your place in the queue, the reason in plain words, and how to ask a nurse to review it. Pilot partner: District hospital. Result: Complaints about waiting order down 27% in three months; 9 in 10 surveyed patients said they understood why they were waiting.

## Funding

Total raised: US$3.85M.

- Pre-seed (2023-07): US$150K, led by Ferrylight Ventures, with Operator angels. Turned a weekend flood simulation into a product: the first Portal engine, a three-person team, and paid pilots with schools across the Mekong Delta.
- Seed (2024-08): US$1.2M, led by Mekong Horizon Ventures, with Ferrylight Ventures, Tamarind Bay Ventures. Funded Portals 1.0, the Tide simulation engine, and Future Self, plus the pilot budgets that moved student solutions onto real streets.
- Pre-Series A (2026-04): US$2.5M, led by Lumacrest Capital, with Mekong Horizon Ventures, Coralline Impact Fund. Scales world-building and AI safety, grows Vietnam, deepens the Indonesia and Philippines pilots, and opens Portal Studio.

Pre-Series A use of funds:

- 40% World-building + AI safety: New science-grounded Portals, the Tide engine, and the guardrails, red-teaming, and child-safety reviews behind every AI citizen.
- 25% Vietnam scale-up + Indonesia/Philippines pilots: School success teams across Vietnam and local launch teams for the Jakarta and Manila pilots.
- 20% Problems Bank pilots: Seed budgets that take the best student solutions from a Portal to a real street, clinic, or canal.
- 15% Portal Studio: Tools that let students and teachers build and publish their own future worlds.

### Investors

- Ferrylight Ventures: Pre-seed fund backing first-time founders in the Mekong Delta who build for the communities they grew up in.
- Operator angels: A small circle of Southeast Asian edtech and gaming operators who wrote early cheques after playing the first flood Portal.
- Mekong Horizon Ventures: Seed-stage venture firm investing in Vietnamese software companies that can win at home, then travel across the region.
- Tamarind Bay Ventures: Early-stage fund focused on learning and workforce products for the 680 million people of Southeast Asia.
- Lumacrest Capital: Growth-minded early-stage investor in AI-native consumer and education platforms with proven school distribution.
- Coralline Impact Fund: Impact fund backing climate-adaptation ventures that put coastal and delta communities in charge of their own resilience.

## Awards and recognition

- 2023 — Ferrylight Accelerator: Cohort 4. A twelve-week program for first-time founders in the Mekong Delta. WTF joined weeks after incorporation and left with its first paying schools.
- 2024 — Riverlight Prize for Learning Futures: Winner. Awarded for the Mekong Delta 2045 Portal and the sponge-lane rain gardens that came out of it.
- 2024 — Tidemark EdTech Grand Prix: Gold — Future Skills. Top honor in the Future Skills category, judged on learning evidence from partner schools.
- 2025 — Asia Learning Frontier 50: Named to the list. An annual list of the 50 most promising learning companies across Asia.
- 2025 — The Monsoon Dispatch “30 Founders to Watch”: Named (Lâm Khánh Linh). Recognized for building a company around student agency and real-world pilots.
- 2026 — Global Classroom Moonshot Award: Finalist. Shortlisted for the Council of 2045 and the 1% Future Pledge as models for giving learners real power.

## Press

- 2023-01-16 — Saigon Circuit: "Cần Thơ eighth-graders turned a flooded lane into a sponge — and the internet noticed" — “Forty seconds, one phone camera, and a class of 13-year-olds explaining drainage better than most consultants.”
- 2023-07-18 — Classroom Forward: "Science teacher turned founder raises US$150K to let students rehearse the future" — “WhereTheFuture is betting that the best way to teach climate science is to let students run a city that is losing to the water.”
- 2024-08-21 — Archipelago Tech Review: "WhereTheFuture raises US$1.2M seed led by Mekong Horizon Ventures to put students inside climate simulations" — “The pitch is unusual for edtech: the company reports how many student ideas were built in the real world before it reports usage.”
- 2024-11-05 — Classroom Forward: "Why Mekong Delta teachers keep asking for “the flood game”" — “Teachers describe a rare thing in a classroom: students arguing about drainage budgets after the bell has rung.”
- 2025-06-12 — The Monsoon Dispatch: "Lâm Khánh Linh wants 13-year-olds in the room where cities decide" — “Linh does not talk about engagement. She talks about rain gardens, bus routes, and who gets a say in 2045.”
- 2025-10-08 — Archipelago Tech Review: "The Vietnamese startup testing its future worlds in Jakarta and Manila" — “Jakarta Floats is the first Portal built outside Vietnam, and local teachers rewrote half of it before a single student logged in.”
- 2026-04-14 — The Monsoon Dispatch: "WhereTheFuture closes US$2.5M Pre-Series A led by Lumacrest Capital" — “Forty cents of every dollar goes to world-building and AI safety — an allocation the founders say is not up for debate.”
- 2026-08-27 — Saigon Circuit: "Inside the teenage council with a veto over an AI company" — “Nine students, one binding veto, and a board seat. The chair was 13 when she typed the question that named the company.”

## Team

Team size: 46.

## Founders

### Lâm Khánh Linh
Co-founder & CEO · Ho Chi Minh City

Lâm Khánh Linh taught science to lower-secondary students in Cần Thơ for seven years, until a flood closed the school in October 2022. The flood Portal that became WhereTheFuture was written on Linh’s kitchen table that weekend, for one grade-8 class that wanted to know whether their city had a future. As CEO, Linh still plays every new Portal with a real class before it ships, holds the company to its north star of shipped solutions over screen time, and teaches one day a month. Linh goes back to Cần Thơ whenever the rains come.

### Đặng Minh Khôi
Co-founder & CTO · Ho Chi Minh City

Đặng Minh Khôi spent years in academic research building agent-based climate models: simulations in which thousands of households, farms, and pumps each make their own decisions as the water rises. Khôi saw the weekend flood prototype, rebuilt it from scratch in a month, and joined as co-founder and CTO when the company was incorporated. Khôi is the architect of Tide, the engine that plays out the consequences of every student decision across decades, and leads engineering, data, and AI infrastructure. The house rule: if a Portal’s science would not survive a hydrologist’s review, it does not ship.

### Trần Mai Phương ("Pip")
Co-founder & Chief World Builder · Cần Thơ

Trần Mai Phương — Pip to everyone, investors included — was the lead designer of a top-10 mobile game in Southeast Asia before trading leaderboards for flood maps. Pip co-built the first Cần Thơ 2045 simulation with Linh over a single weekend, drawing the city street by street. As co-founder and Chief World Builder, Pip leads Portal narrative and art: the writers, illustrators, and science reviewers who make each future feel like a place worth visiting. Every new world faces the same test from Pip: would a fourteen-year-old ask to stay after the bell?

## Leadership

### Dr. Sofia Reyes
Chief Learning Officer · Manila

Dr. Sofia Reyes holds a PhD in learning sciences and spent more than a decade designing curriculum for public and private schools across the Philippines. Sofia’s research on futures literacy — how young people learn to reason about several possible futures instead of a single predicted one — became the backbone of how Portals are assessed. As Chief Learning Officer, Sofia maps every Portal to national curricula, designs the skills behind the Future Passport, and runs teacher training. From Manila, Sofia also leads the Philippines pilot with partner schools across the metro.

### Nguyễn Hoàng Nam
Head of Cities & Partnerships · Hà Nội

Nguyễn Hoàng Nam spent ten years on the other side of the table, managing city-infrastructure projects and watching good ideas die in procurement. Now Nam runs the Problems Bank: sitting down with ward public-works teams, district hospitals, and NGOs, turning their unsolved problems into Portals, and fighting for the budget that takes the best student solution to a real pilot site. Nam negotiated the company’s first city partnerships and measures success in exactly one unit — things that actually got built, and are still working a year later.

### Amara Okafor
Head of Trust & Safety · Singapore

Amara Okafor has spent a career on child-safety AI and data protection for consumer platforms used by millions of young people across Africa and Asia. As Head of Trust & Safety, Amara owns the guardrails around every AI citizen and every Future Self conversation, runs red-team reviews before each release, and leads data protection across Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Amara also staffs the Council of 2045: briefing its members on proposed features, explaining the risks plainly, and making sure their veto stays final.

### Putri Wijaya
Country Lead, Indonesia · Jakarta

Putri Wijaya grew up in North Jakarta, where tidal flooding was part of the school calendar. Before WhereTheFuture, Putri spent eight years launching education programs in Indonesian schools, from teacher training to after-school science clubs. As Country Lead for Indonesia, Putri runs the Jakarta pilot: recruiting partner schools, adapting the Jakarta Floats Portal with local teachers, and bringing student ideas to the neighborhood teams that can test them. The goal is concrete — a Jakarta student’s solution running on a Jakarta street, with the class there to see it switched on.

### Lê Gia Bảo
Head of Growth & Schools · Ho Chi Minh City

Lê Gia Bảo built school sales for a fast-growing learning app in Vietnam before joining WhereTheFuture as one of its first ten employees. As Head of Growth & Schools, Bảo leads the team that brings new schools on board, trains their teachers, and keeps them renewing year after year. The playbook is unglamorous on purpose: visit the school, play a Portal with the hardest class in the building, and only then talk about licenses. Bảo also runs the Explorer home plan for families who want the Portals at the kitchen table.

## Council of 2045

9 students aged 14 to 19 hold veto power over any feature that touches minors’ data, and one non-voting observer seat on our board. They have used the veto, and we are better for it.

- Võ Ngọc Hân, 17, Vietnam (chair): Chairs the Council; leads every review of features that touch minors’ data.
- Minh Anh, 16, Vietnam: Privacy defaults and what parents can and cannot see.
- Tuấn, 15, Vietnam: Accessibility for students with low bandwidth and older phones.
- Thảo, 19, Vietnam: Future Passport consent rules and who may read a student’s record.
- Dimas, 18, Indonesia: Fair selection of which student solutions get piloted.
- Ayu, 14, Indonesia: Making hard Portal themes safe for the youngest players.
- Rafi, 16, Indonesia: Language support in Bahasa Indonesia and regional languages.
- Bea, 17, Philippines: Future Self guardrails and mental-health escalation.
- Joaquin, 15, Philippines: Royalties and scholarships under the 1% Future Pledge.

## Advisors

### Trịnh Văn Đức
Advisor, public education · Hà Nội

Trịnh Văn Đức is a former deputy education minister who spent three decades in public education, starting as a mathematics teacher in a rural district school. Đức advises WhereTheFuture on how Portals fit inside public-school curricula and how education departments evaluate and adopt new learning tools. The advice to the team never changes: earn teachers’ trust first, because no policy survives a classroom that does not believe in it. Đức also mentors the Council of 2045 on how to turn a strong opinion into a proposal that officials can say yes to.

### Rizal Santoso
Advisor, climate adaptation · Jakarta

Rizal Santoso is a climate-adaptation urban planner who has spent two decades designing flood defenses, retention parks, and resettlement plans for coastal neighborhoods in Jakarta. Rizal reviews the science and planning logic behind the coastal Portals, including Jakarta Floats and Mekong Delta 2045, and helps match student solutions with neighborhood teams ready to pilot them. Rizal’s conviction shapes the Problems Bank: the best adaptation ideas come from the people who will live with the results, and the youngest residents will live with them longest.

### Prof. Nadia Rahman
Advisor, child psychology · Singapore

Prof. Nadia Rahman is a child-psychology professor whose research focuses on adolescent identity, anxiety about the future, and how young people build a sense of agency. Nadia advises WhereTheFuture on Future Self and on every Portal that deals with hard themes such as disaster, illness, and loss, and helped design the age bands and distress-escalation rules the platform uses today. One question guides every review: does this experience leave a student feeling more capable, or more afraid? If the answer is unclear, the feature waits.

## Roadmap

- Oct 2022: Cần Thơ flood class experiment
- Mar 2023: Company founded
- Jul 2023: Pre-seed round — US$150K
- 2023: 12 schools in the Mekong Delta
- Aug 2024: Seed round — US$1.2M
- 2024: Portals 1.0 + Future Self
- 2024: First 5 piloted solutions
- 2025: Future Passport
- 2025: Problems Bank with 3 Vietnamese cities
- 2025: Indonesia + Philippines pilots
- Apr 2026: Pre-Series A round — US$2.5M
- 2026: 1% Future Pledge live
- 2026: Portal Studio beta
- 2027: 200,000 learners (planned)
- 2027: Portal Studio open to all teachers (planned)
- 2027: Series A (planned)
- 2028: Youth Future Parliament (planned)
- 2028: Southeast Asia rollout (planned)

## Open roles

- Senior Simulation Engineer, Tide — Engineering, Ho Chi Minh City, Full-time. Extend Tide, our agent-based simulation engine, so a classroom of 40 can play out flooding, heat, budgets, and public trust over decades in seconds. You will work with climate and health reviewers to keep every Portal scientifically honest.
- AI Safety Engineer — Trust & Safety, Singapore or remote (Southeast Asia), Full-time. Build the guardrails, evaluations, and red-team tooling behind every AI citizen and Future Self conversation. You will present your work to the Council of 2045, and they can say no.
- World Builder, Narrative — World-building, Cần Thơ, Full-time. Write the futures students visit: characters, conflicts, and choices that feel real to a 14-year-old and hold up to a scientist. Game-writing or interactive-fiction experience matters more than a degree.
- Learning Designer, Science & Civics — Learning, Hà Nội or remote (Vietnam), Full-time. Map Portals to the science and civics curriculum, design the evidence behind Future Passport skills, and run classroom trials with teachers. Classroom teaching experience required.
- Partnerships Manager, Philippines — Cities & Partnerships, Manila, Full-time. Bring Problems Bank to Philippine cities: find real problems worth a Portal, line up pilot sites and budgets, and see student solutions through to measured results.
- School Success Manager — Growth & Schools, Ho Chi Minh City, Full-time. Own a portfolio of partner schools: onboard teachers, run Portal days in classrooms, and make sure every school renews because students asked for it.
- Product Designer, Portal Studio — Product, Ho Chi Minh City or remote (Southeast Asia), Full-time. Design the tools students and teachers use to build their own future worlds — maps, roles, AI citizens, and rules — simple enough for a grade-7 class and deep enough for our own world-builders.
- Community Lead, Indonesia — Growth & Schools, Jakarta, Contract. Grow the teacher community around the Jakarta pilot: run workshops, translate and adapt Portal materials into Bahasa Indonesia, and bring teacher feedback straight to the world-building team.

## How we hire

Typical time from first message to decision: three to four weeks.

1. Write to us: Send a CV or portfolio to careers@wherethefuture.org with the role in the subject line. Add a few sentences about a future you would want students to visit. No cover-letter template needed, and imperfect English is fine — our name is a typo.
2. A conversation, not a quiz: A short video call with the hiring manager about the role, your work, and what you want next. You will leave knowing the salary range and the full process.
3. A paid work sample: A small task drawn from real work: a Portal scene, a guardrail review, a pilot plan. It takes a few hours at most, we pay for your time, and you keep the rights to it.
4. Meet the team: Meet the people you would work with most. For roles that touch students, this includes members of the Council of 2045, and a safeguarding background check before any offer.
5. A clear answer: We reply to everyone who applies, and we explain our decision. If it is a yes, the offer comes in writing with salary, equity, and start date in the same document.

## FAQ

### What is WhereTheFuture?
WhereTheFuture lets students visit the future before they live in it — then ship real fixes back to the present. Students enter Portals — science-grounded simulations of real places in the future — take on real roles, and see the consequences of their decisions. The best student solutions become funded pilots in real cities through our Problems Bank.

### Who is it for?
Portals are built for students aged 11 to 18, in lower- and upper-secondary school. Content is age-banded: younger students get shorter sessions and gentler themes, and Future Self conversations are only available from age 13 with school and parent consent.

### Is it safe for children?
Safety is the floor, not the feature. Every AI citizen and Future Self conversation runs inside reviewed guardrails, signs of distress are escalated to a trained person and the student’s school, and any feature that touches minors’ data needs approval from the 9 students on our Council of 2045, who hold a binding veto.

### What happens to student data?
We collect only what a Portal needs to run and a teacher needs to teach. We never sell student data or use it for advertising. Future Passport records belong to the student, and universities or employers can read them only with the student’s consent.

### How much does it cost?
Schools and education departments pay an annual per-student license. Families can subscribe to the Explorer home plan. Partner Portals are sponsored by cities, NGOs, and companies, and universities and employers pay to read verified skills through the Passport API. Students never pay to have their solution piloted.

### How does a student solution become a real pilot?
A partner posts a real problem to the Problems Bank. We build a Portal around it and run it across partner schools. Students pitch their solutions to a joint panel of the partner, teachers, and our team; the strongest get a pilot budget and a real site. We measure the result and publish it — 37 student solutions have been piloted so far.

### Where is WhereTheFuture available?
We work with 140 partner schools in 14 provinces and cities across Vietnam, with pilots in Indonesia and the Philippines.

### How can my school, city, or organization partner with you?
Schools can start with a free Portal day for one class. Cities, NGOs, and companies can bring a problem to the Problems Bank. Write to partners@wherethefuture.org or use the form on our partner page, and we will reply within two working days.

### Why is it called WTF?
In October 2022, after floods closed her school in Cần Thơ, a 13-year-old student typed “where the future?” into the class chat. She meant: where is our future if the city keeps flooding? Students started calling the project WTF, and we kept the typo. Grammar mistakes are allowed; giving up on the future is not.

### Is a Portal a game?
It plays like one, on purpose. But every Portal is reviewed by scientists and teachers, mapped to the curriculum, and assessed on reasoning rather than points. There is no single winning ending — every future is plural.

## Offices

- Singapore, Singapore: Headquarters and Trust & Safety
- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: Operations, engineering, and schools
- Cần Thơ, Vietnam: World-building studio, where the first Portal was built
- Hà Nội, Vietnam: Schools and city partnerships, northern Vietnam

## Contact

- General: hello@wherethefuture.org
- Press: press@wherethefuture.org
- Schools & cities: partners@wherethefuture.org
- Careers: careers@wherethefuture.org
- Investors: investors@wherethefuture.org