Creating and grading assessments is likely one of the most time-consuming duties lecturers have to take care of. In Vietnam, a startup referred to as Azota desires to assist with an internet software program platform that not solely helps educators develop and proctor assessments, but in addition mechanically grades them utilizing data from Vietnamese instructing supplies. The corporate introduced right now it has raised $2.4 million in pre-Sequence A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures.
Based final 12 months, Azota now counts 700,000 lecturers and 10 million college students in main, secondary and excessive faculties amongst its customers. It says that in peak check intervals, it serves over six million customers every month, or about 30% of the full variety of lecturers and college students in Vietnam. It claims it could possibly lower down the grading course of from two hours when completed manually to only two minutes.
Azota’s creation got here amidst the pandemic in 2021. Earlier than co-founding the startup, Au Nguyen, its CEO, labored for Viettel, one of many largest telecoms in Vietnam. He led an academic unit on faculty administration options, however realized that educators had many ache factors that his crew couldn’t clear up. In consequence, he determined to crew up together with his associates, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to create Azota.
“Because the crew sees it, there are two main scopes of labor for lecturers: instructing and assigning and grading assessments,” they informed Nob6 in an electronic mail. “Throughout the COVID occasions, instructing had to go surfing, and there have been quite a few instruments to assist this modification reminiscent of Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Group, and so forth. However on the subject of on-line assigning and grading, there have been few instruments accessible, which made the method very labor-intensive and time-consuming.”
Azota constructed an optical character recognition app to mechanically acknowledge Q&A’s from check photographs taken from lecturers’ telephones. It shuffles these questions and solutions to create lots of of modified check combos. For the reason that OCR was constructed utilizing Vietnamese instructing supplies, the crew stated it could possibly acknowledge Vietnamese assessments with a 99% accuracy charge.
Azota’s founders are additionally engaged on a extra superior query financial institution options that may permit lecturers to select and selected from its stock to create exams from scratch.
The startup is utilized by educators throughout the nation, with about 22% coming from the key cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, and the remainder distributed equally amongst all provinces in Vietnam, they added.
The crew identifies two predominant teams of rivals. The primary are massive companies that present studying administration software program (LMS) to colleges, however they are saying it’s nonetheless a fragmented market in Vietnam with totally different corporations dominating totally different areas.
The second are startups that present instruments for lecturers, however Azota’s founders say the instructing software section remains to be early and Azota differentiates by utilizing a product-led progress mannequin, fixing lecturers’ predominant challenges as they develop, particularly for assigning and grading, as an alternative of making an attempt to handle each challenge that comes up.
In a ready assertion, GGV Capital international managing companion Jixun Foo stated, “Utilizing know-how to empower lecturers to show higher, Azota makes nice schooling accessible to thousands and thousands of scholars. They’ll unleash the true potential of lecturers to groom the following technology of Vietnamese youth.”
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