Cerebry - Summary for Kevin (14th October)

In short, Cerebry (https://www.cerebry.co) is a practice platform for math and it does not use any human-created question database. We just teach the AI the theorems and it comes up with questions and an adaptive learning journey on it's own. This means that it can act as a virtual tutor to a student. If there are 40 students in a class, they would have 40 different learning journey with completely different sets of questions. Claiming that we are an AI tutor already is exaggerated, there are so many elements to teaching - interaction, introduction, presentation, etc.. But we are the next step in the evolution of adaptive learning. We do not use human created databases of questions allowing the engine tremendous flexibility.

The AI understands/generateds questions just like a teacher does. Like a human teacher, if a student is struggling, the AI will help the student step by step. Maybe show the student a hint? Maybe a step-by-step solution is needed? Maybe the student just needs to practice more on similar question? Maybe, the student needs to revise the concept? And maybe, all this is not enough and the AI needs to break the question down to find out exact concept where the student is struggling. These are all the things that a good human tutor would do.

This is based off 6 years of research at NUS into making a generic framework for automatic question generation. This is not even limited to math. We proved that this can be done for any domain and we published after applying this to Physics, English, etc.. The motivation for doing this is a little personal. Growing up in India, I saw the impact that good education has on low income families. The government subsidised education to elite schools and they are really good, like IITs, AIIMS, etc.. But there are a million applicants for 5000 spots and the outcome is decided by a standardised test. There is a huge after school tuition industry that serves the kids who can afford them and helps them get in. I grew up in 3rd tier cities and I saw the stark difference in tuition standards. Good teachers will not come there, they will go to bigger cities. Online education like Byjus and Khan Academy solve the content problem but do not solve the practice problem. If we succeed and when we scale, we can make this nearly free for every kid. We can actually democratise education.

We raised 450K USD at 3M valuation cap last year to build the tech. We built this out for secondary school math. We have more than 30,000 kids in 550 schools using us now. Most of them are from one government contract in India, but we have schools in Singapore, Philippines and India using us. I presented this to Singapore University of Technology and Design, they did a paid pilot and now they have made this compulsory for any freshman who joins SUTD. They want to make sure the students' foundations are strong when they join the uni.

I am building up the distribution now. We have already entered a partnership with distributors in Singapore, Thailand and Philippines. In the next one or 2 weeks, we will likely be able to finalise India distribution as well. Topica has offered to fund the project and expand this in Vietnam if we revenue share. They want to use us to expand to other countries as well but we are definitely going ahead with them in Vietnam. Cuemath gave us an offer to acquire at 6M USD last year but they ran a chain of after-school tuition centers till then and they just want to use this to differentiate themselves. I just talked to Byjus this month and they have expressed an interest in acquisition but have not given an offer. I definitely want to exit someday but I do not want this to become a small toy that a traditional after-school program uses to differentiate their offering.

In the last week, we potentially signed on 18,000 more students for a free pilot in the Philippines spread over 3 school chains. Of course, not everyone might convert to paying users and contracts have not been signed. But that is the state of the union as it were right now ;)