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In 2021, when Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered math teaching assistant ByteLearn was launched, its sole purpose was to enable the teaching fraternity to provide every student with a personalised adaptive assistance. With students demanding fast and effective learning, the ByteLearn process emphasises upon the practical application of a skill, using memes, gifs, and quizzes for higher level of engagement with learners.

ByteLearn has now become a dependable tool for over 100 million teachers and 1.5 billion students across the world. As a personal tutoring assistant, the platform is supportive and engaging, considers the emotions and motivation of the student as the first level. This is followed by creating a non-judgmental learning experience where mistakes are celebrated.

According to a recent McKinsey survey, teachers are working at an average of 50 hours a week. Research estimates that 20 to 40 percent of those hours are spent on activities that could be automated leveraging technology as they are not able to focus on the most critical activity – teaching. By taking over a teacher’s mundane, burnout-inducing tasks, ByteLearn aims to give educators more time to focus on the student experience. Offering a smarter and faster experience, the concept of adaptive learning seeks to personalise education to every individual learner.

Here’s how ByteLearn works

The student takes a photo of the math problem. This is then converted into machine readable math. The step-by-step solver applies formulae of math in finding the solution. The guidance module identifies the relevant knowledge points providing explanations, hints and lessons. Lastly, the chatbot communicates with the student, sharing guidance and taking inputs.

Centred around micro-learning and blended-learning, this game changing technology-driven ed-tech platform handholds the student while solving a problem, identifies the learning gaps, and then provides personalised lessons to accelerate. Saving up to 40 hours per week for each teacher, the teaching assistant builds a knowledge graph of students’ skills and based on the grade or difficulty levels, it provides actionable insights for the teachers to leverage.

Meet the founders

Aditya Singhal and Nishant Sinha, co-founders of ByteLearn are alumni of IIT Delhi, each with 15 years of edtech experience. Both are serial entrepreneurs with a rich expertise over product, growth, customer acquisition and business. Prior to ByteLearn, Aditya and Nishant co-founded Instasolv (acquired by Vedantu) and have touched the lives of more than 25 million students across 120 countries in different ventures. While Aditya is passionate about leveraging technology towards domains like clean energy, education, medical and e-commerce, Nishant is a start-up enthusiast, angel investor and mentor to various start-ups.

The other team members include Dr Ankur Narang, a graduate from IIT Delhi, Ph.D. Computer Science in AI/ML from IIT Delhi, an ex-IBM, SUN, Yatra and Hike; Dr Harisankar, an IIT Madras graduate, a Ph.D. in Computer science, Lead AI Scientist having worked with Airtel X Labs and Shield Square. Kitt Hirasaki is the Head of Design, with exposure to Harvard University, Khan Academy, Coursera and Pixar. Sourabh Singh is the head of academics and is a trained engineer from IIT Patna. Charuta Joshi is the Head of Curriculum and hails from Mott Hall School, New York and was earlier connected with ‘Teach for America’.

The impact

In 2021, ByteLearn did pilot runs in the US with three topics for 7^th grade mathematics. In 2022, they are offering a full grade math curriculum for 6^th ,7^th and 8^th grades. In 2023, they are eyeing to gain 10 million active users with early metrics for 7^th and 8^th grade market adoption. By 2024, ByteLearn is targeting 100 million monthly active users, with nearly 60 percent using the platform.

As of now, ByteLearn has raised $9.5 million in a seed round, via Chiratae Ventures, Leocapital, 9Unicorns, Pitchright Ventures, Wavefrom VC, Cloud cap, Goodwater Capital, Earlsfield Capital, Advantedge VC and Venturecatalyst. They have also managed to attract angel investors like Anand Chandrashekharan, Alok Mittal– Ex Cannan, Ashish Sharma– Innoven, Vivek-Bounce, Saurabh Saxena– Uable, Ravi Bhushan-Brightchamps, Tej Kapoor-Fosun RZ Capital, Indrani Choudhary-CLO Microsoft, Ravi Garikipati– Ex Flipkart CTO and many more. Their future funding will help them improve the adaptive learning technology and the product, Go-to-Market, create exceptional content and begin with early monetisation.