Edia, an AI-powered math education platform, guarantees school districts higher math scores for his or her students inside a 12 months of launch – or a full refund. The daring promise reflects the startup's confidence in its comprehensive solution, which leverages artificial intelligence to supply personalized student feedback, equip teachers with real-time data, and enable targeted interventions. The company recently closed a $9.4 million Series A round led by Felicis, with participation from 8VC, Inspired Capital, Susa Ventures, and angels including JD Ross (the founding father of Opendoor).
“Instead of just being an answer that may be a single product where you teach kids about it for 20 minutes, Edia is a whole solution,” said Joe Philleo, co-founder and CEO of Edia, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “We actually went right into a district and asked, 'What do you ought to accomplish?' Implement Edia in your sixth through twelfth grade classes, and in case you don’t see higher results inside a 12 months, it’s completely free.”
A key differentiator is Edia's ability to present students the power to type and show their math work directly on Chromebooks – a feature inspired by tools for typing complex Chinese and Japanese characters. “If you ought to enter an exponent, you’ll be able to simply start typing “exponent”, “ex-p” and the exponent will appear immediately. You just hit enter and it creates,” Philleo explained. “This means entering math on the pc is effortless.”
Edia then uses AI to supply step-by-step instructions when a student gets stuck, in addition to providing personalized feedback on the coed's own work and pinpointing precise errors. “It will give you the option to read the coed’s work and compare it to the actual solution,” Philleo said. “It can detect, oh, you made a mistake there. It doesn't just say, “Hey, you were fallacious, read the reason, watch the video,” but reasonably, “You were fallacious since you added the exponents as a substitute of multiplying them.”
Real-time performance predictions
Beyond feedback, Edia's AI predicts each student's competency on state learning standards based on their work on the platform. In the 2017-2018 school 12 months alone, students answered greater than 200 million questions on Edia. “We can train a model to predict how likely students are to perform well on a given standard based on all of the work students have ever done in this system,” Philleo said. “It’s really shockingly accurate.”
Armed with this real-time predictive data, teachers can immediately form small groups to supply targeted support and practice. School administrators can even quickly discover at-risk students who need additional resources comparable to tutoring. This is in contrast to the quarterly benchmark assessments that many districts currently depend on.
“In a number of districts they might do these quarterly assessments or quarterly benchmarks where once 1 / 4 they might discover where their students are at,” Philleo said. “Dallas ISD's CTO calls this 'post-mortem data' because once you get that quarterly benchmark, you’re thinking that back prefer it's too late. In contrast, with Edia, teachers get real-time data.”
Take on the incumbents with a daring guarantee
With its comprehensive platform and money-back guarantee, Edia hopes to profit from the huge digital transformation in K-12 education. Post-pandemic, districts are equipped with Chromebooks for each student and are investing heavily in learning interventions to handle growing achievement gaps. Edia has already found eager customers, and faculty districts in Virginia are using the platform to discover students for the state's $400 million tutoring initiative.
However, Edia faces established competitors like Khan Academy, IXLAnd DreamBox Learning which have long dominated the digital mathematics market. The company must reveal that it might deliver higher results to win over districts. Philleo believes Edia's modern, mobile-first architecture and teacher-empowering approach will ultimately prevail against competitors designed for an earlier era. “Many of those programs are literally designed for what I call the pc lab era,” he said. “Edia is the one solution designed to supply teachers and districts with this comprehensive core math workflow.”
If Edia's AI can continually improve scores on state math tests, the corporate could change into a pioneer in the approaching wave of algorithm-driven education. School districts should closely monitor Edia's results to see whether the young company resides as much as its ambitious guarantee.
