Meet the team

Janneke Plaisier

Janneke Plaisier is one of the founders of LessonUp. She firmly believes that education should be inspiring and full of life, and this serves as her incentive to turn LessonUp into a successful business and product. She sees it as her personal duty to provide every teacher with the best tools to allow them to create an amazing educational experience.

Prior to founding LessonUp Janneke worked at various educational publishing companies, providing her with ample opportunity to visit many schools, speak to hundreds of teachers and attend as many classes. This gave her a clear picture of how technology can contribute improving education, as well as making it more fun -- not only for the students, but also the teachers!

Janneke is part of the daily management at LessonUp.

Martin Kool

LessonUp is often praised for its usability. Much of this is because the interaction, presentation and overall experience is in the hands of co-founder Martin Kool. His attention to detail is unsurpassed -- he even made sure the animation of the trashcan was the right way around!

As a partner of parent company Q42, Martin has laid the groundwork of numerous well-known educational platforms and apps. He is also author and creator of quite a few educational games that are played around the world in schools and families at home, and on occasion have won international prizes.

Martin has children of his own that attend primary and secondary school, allowing him to keep a close eye on the digitization of schools. LessonUp is his way of making it easier to use the internet and its devices in the classroom.

Kars Veling

As a developer -- Kars has been developing since age 10 -- he founded the "creative technology" company Q42, mainly because he wanted “to make the internet just a little more user-friendly”. Q42 has not only completed projects for Dutch broadcasting networks, Het Rijksmuseum, Staatsloterij and Philips, but has also developed several educational concepts: amongst others Schooltas and interactive whiteboard software for educational distributor Malmberg. In 2014 Kars founded CodeUur (CodeHour), to teach software development to children in primary school.

Entrepreneurship runs through Kars’ veins, and he is continually working on innovation, technology and new business models.

As co-founder and CTO of LessonUp his focus is on business strategy and the technical architecture of the platform. And on occasion he still develops some of the software, because, well...that’s where his roots are.

Tim Meerhof

Tim graduated as a sociologist at Erasmus University and acted as organizer of educational programs and mentoring courses. On top of that he has supervised hundreds of full-day educational programs from primary up to FE (Further Education) level. So he knows what it takes to keep a class interested and motivated!

While working on these educational programs, Tim taught himself software development so he could digitalize teaching materials and make them increasingly more visual and interactive, so to better reflect the needs of students. This is where his passion for software was born, and when given the opportunity to combine this with his passion for education, the choice to join LessonUp was an easy one.

It is his way to contribute to innovation in education.

Jan-Wolter Smit

Striving for the ideal educational experience of students and teachers is one of the themes in Jan-Wolter's life. He has been teaching for over 20 years and is the educational author and founder of Geschiedenisleraar.nl. In all these disciplines he seeks an optimal balance between content, gains, motivation and innovation.

As Head of Community Jan-Wolter ensures LessonUp's mission and the needs of education are balanced, as well as making sure they reinforce each other.

Tim Logtenberg

Tim is an experienced front- en backend software engineer. Next to coding and creating for LessonUp is Tim a Computer Science teacher at the Sint Maartens College in Voorburg

Anton Steenvoorden

Anton joined the LessonUp team to help with his AI and machine learning software engineering skills. Right now, he's working on his Bachelors thesis with one hand, and the other hand creates the most beautiful data analysis algorithms.