Mission
A flood, a typo, and a class that refused to wait.
WhereTheFuture lets students visit the future before they live in it — then ship real fixes back to the present. It started in one science classroom, with one question nobody could answer.
01Origin
Oct 2022 to Mar 2023.
From a closed school to a company in 5 months. Nobody planned a startup; a class just kept going after the water dropped.
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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
02The name
Keep the typo.
“where the future?”
WTF?Where The Future.
Students shortened the question to three letters before we ever had a logo. When it came time to name the company, we kept the grammar mistake and the acronym. They remind us who the future belongs to.
Grammar mistakes are allowed; giving up on the future is not.
03Mission & vision
Mission and vision
Vision 2035
100 million students have visited a future and 10,000 of their solutions are running in the real world.
04Values
How we work.
The rules we hire for, argue with, and hold each other to.
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.
05Roadmap
2022 to 2028.
What we have shipped, and where we are headed next. Planned milestones are marked as plans, not promises.
How we are fundedCần Thơ flood class experiment
Company founded
Pre-seed round — US$150K
12 schools in the Mekong Delta
Seed round — US$1.2M
Portals 1.0 + Future Self
First 5 piloted solutions
Future Passport
Problems Bank with 3 Vietnamese cities
Indonesia + Philippines pilots
Pre-Series A round — US$2.5M
1% Future Pledge live
Portal Studio beta
Planned
200,000 learners
Planned
Portal Studio open to all teachers
Planned
Series A
Planned
Youth Future Parliament
Planned
Southeast Asia rollout
Join the story
Help build the next future.
We are a small team with a long horizon. If you teach, build, or fund the future, there is a seat for you.