Creating and grading assessments is without doubt one of the most time-consuming duties academics must cope with. In Vietnam, a startup referred to as Azota desires to assist with a web-based software program platform that not solely helps educators develop and proctor assessments, but in addition routinely grades them utilizing info from Vietnamese educating supplies. The corporate introduced immediately it has raised $2.4 million in pre-Collection A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures.
Based final yr, Azota now counts 700,000 academics 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 whole variety of academics and college students in Vietnam. It claims it might lower down the grading course of from two hours when accomplished manually to simply 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 college administration options, however realized that educators had many ache factors that his workforce couldn’t remedy. Consequently, he determined to workforce up together with his pals, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to create Azota.
“Because the workforce sees it, there are two main scopes of labor for academics: educating and assigning and grading assessments,” they instructed TechCrunch in an electronic mail. “Throughout the COVID occasions, educating had to go surfing, and there have been quite a few instruments to assist this transformation akin to Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Group, and many others. However on the subject of on-line assigning and grading, there have been few instruments obtainable, which made the method very labor-intensive and time-consuming.”
Azota constructed an optical character recognition app to routinely acknowledge Q&A’s from check pictures taken from academics’ telephones. It shuffles these questions and solutions to create tons of of modified check mixtures. For the reason that OCR was constructed utilizing Vietnamese educating supplies, the workforce stated it might acknowledge Vietnamese assessments with a 99% accuracy charge.
Azota’s founders are additionally engaged on a extra superior query financial institution options that can enable academics to choose 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 most important cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh Metropolis, and the remainder distributed equally amongst all provinces in Vietnam, they added.
The workforce identifies two primary teams of rivals. The primary are large firms that present studying administration software program (LMS) to varsities, however they are saying it’s nonetheless a fragmented market in Vietnam with completely different firms dominating completely different areas.
The second are startups that present instruments for academics, however Azota’s founders say the educating device section continues to be early and Azota differentiates through the use of a product-led development mannequin, fixing academics’ primary challenges as they develop, particularly for assigning and grading, as a substitute of making an attempt to deal with each challenge that comes up.
In a ready assertion, GGV Capital international managing associate Jixun Foo stated, “Utilizing know-how to empower academics to show higher, Azota makes nice training accessible to thousands and thousands of scholars. They will unleash the true potential of academics to groom the subsequent technology of Vietnamese youth.”