Who is An-Nam?
An-Nam Pham is a creative mind and a natural problem-solver, in technology and well beyond it. He is drawn to new ideas and enjoys building things that have not been done before. He is also warm and easy to talk to. People find him a good listener.
This side of him goes back a long way. While he was still at school, and later during his civilian service at a youth centre, An-Nam worked as a maths tutor. He enjoyed helping children with what they found hard at school. For him it went beyond the right answer: what mattered was that each child felt seen and helped as a person.
At that youth centre, this became clear to everyone around him. He was well liked, and over time he became the person many children came to when something was wrong, because they trusted him with their problems.
An-Nam co-founded Maths Angel with two people close to him: his younger brother, Alex Pham, and Lexie Li, whom Alex has known since university. Building a company with his brother felt right to An-Nam; the trust between them runs deep. Together, they want every student to have the same feeling those children had at the youth centre: that someone is paying real attention to them, one by one.
What is he doing at Maths Angel?
An-Nam builds toward one clear vision: a guardian angel for maths, there for every child. He pictures a private tutor in digital form, affordable and ready whenever a student needs help, rather than a stranger booked by the hour. That tutor is ChatCat, the name An-Nam gave him. (He also named the cool cat on the Maths Angel logo, Jimmy.)
ChatCat sits at the heart of Maths Angel, built deeply into the platform itself. He knows every learning resource on the site (the lessons, videos, flashcards, past papers and more), and he knows each student too: their strengths and weak spots, and the small personal things that help them learn. He uses all of this to teach. At the same time, he keeps track of each student's progress, including quiz results and GCSE past-paper scores, so the help stays personal and keeps getting better.
An-Nam designed the whole system behind this, and he builds almost all of it himself. He is a full-stack engineer: he builds the front end, the back end, the middleware, the calculation engines and the AI modules. The one part he hands over is the final design of the screens that students see (the user interface), which Lexie and her team shape; he guides and supports them as they grow.
How he builds matters as much as what he builds. Because ChatCat works with real information about each student, child safety and data protection come first. He builds in moderation that keeps harmful content away from students, he keeps their data secure, and he makes the service stable, so it keeps running smoothly even when many students are using it at the same time.
An-Nam also keeps Maths Angel modern, and this is where the “Innovation” in his title comes in. He follows the newest technology closely, builds small prototypes and tests them, so only the best new tools make it into the product. A few examples: ChatCat now teaches visually as well as in words; he adapts to each student, covering their strong and weak maths topics as well as how they learn and behave; and a new, more accurate system for grading GCSE past papers is coming soon.
Why he is the right person to do this?
Building a maths tutor for children is harder than it looks. It needs two very different kinds of person. One understands children: how they learn, and how to keep them going when they lose confidence. The other can build safe, reliable technology that handles a child's data without ever putting it at risk. These two people rarely live in one person. In An-Nam, they do.
He has actually done the tutoring. He sat with children who were stuck, he was the one many of them trusted, and he learned that good teaching is about much more than the right answer. He cares about a child's wellbeing and about keeping them motivated to get better, step by step. That care is built into ChatCat, because the person who shaped it has sat on the other side of the table.
He is also the engineer who makes this work, safely. His career has been spent protecting data and keeping important systems running without fail. You can read the detail in the next section. That is what a children's AI tutor needs: it has to be there the moment a student needs it, and the information it holds about each child has to stay private and secure.
This is why An-Nam is the right person to build it. He brings several sides at once: a creative mind, a careful engineer, and a former tutor who cares about the child at the other end of the screen. ChatCat is better because all of those sides built it.
His professional background
An-Nam earned his degree the hard way, and the practical way. He studied through a German Duales Studium, a dual-study programme where you hold down a full-time job and complete a university degree at the same time. In 2016 he finished a BSc in Business Informatics (specialising in IT consulting) at FHDW Bergisch Gladbach, all while working full time at a SAP Gold Partner consultancy, a firm with a very high level of SAP accreditation.
His final-year thesis was graded 1.0, the top grade the German system gives. Its title was “Safeguarding Business Continuity in in-memory databases”: in plain words, how to prevent important computer systems from failing and keep them running without interruption.
Through everything that followed, one thing stayed constant: the way An-Nam thinks and works is client-oriented and solution-oriented. He starts from what the people in front of him actually need, then builds the solution that solves it. At that consultancy, this took him from student to Partner faster than anyone before him, earned through client trust and steady, dependable work. His specialism was SAP Security and Data Protection: keeping large companies' core business systems secure and the personal data inside them protected, in line with data-protection rules like GDPR.
He then joined SAP itself, one of the largest software companies in the world, as a project manager on its RISE cloud-migration programme. With his team, he moved the core systems of companies with revenues in the billions of pounds onto the cloud, without interrupting their business.
Across more than ten years in SAP security and data protection, that same way of working stayed with him: understand the real need, then build the safe, reliable solution that meets it. At Maths Angel, the need is a child's, and the solution is ChatCat. You can see his full career on his LinkedIn profile.
Frequently asked questions
Who built ChatCat, the Maths Angel AI tutor?
An-Nam Pham, Maths Angel's Co-Founder and Chief Technology & Innovation Officer (CTIO). He designed the system and builds almost all of it himself, the back end through to the AI, and he keeps it running. His name is on this page so you always know who stands behind it.
Is ChatCat safe for my child?
Child safety is built in from the start. An-Nam builds in moderation designed to keep harmful content away from students, and he protects every student's data and keeps it secure. His whole career before Maths Angel was in security and data protection, so keeping data safe is the work he knows best.
Does ChatCat replace my child's teacher?
No. ChatCat gives every child the kind of one-to-one help a private tutor would give, affordable and available any time of day. It works alongside what your child learns at school, helping them when they are stuck and keeping them motivated to improve.
Meet the rest of the team
An-Nam is one of three founders. His brother, Alex Pham, Co-Founder and CEO, and Lexie Li, Co-Founder and COO, complete the founding team. Alex sets the vision and the teaching, Lexie shapes how it looks and feels, and An-Nam builds the technology that holds it all together, with ChatCat at the heart. You can meet the whole team on our About page.
Or see An-Nam's work for yourself: meet ChatCat, the AI maths tutor he built, and try GCSE Boost, our AI past-paper marker aligned with the official mark schemes and exam methods.