Tim Draper interviews an education-technology founder about Taleemabad, an AI platform that reads Urdu handwriting and is already used by hundreds of thousands of students and teachers across public school districts. The system improves itself through real classroom data.
Where is your edge? How are you going to rise above the rest?
There's a lot of education companies out there. I think it seems that everyone has cracked it. As a teacher, I understand nobody has. I think it is in the accuracy. Even if the kid has drawn something and written Urdu and the handwriting is really dirty, those accuracy rates are really, really high. And because it's deployed in public schools in whole districts, That means that every single time a teacher tests a check, the accuracy keeps on getting better and better and better. It's amazing that you stuck with education.
People in that field drift off into something else. Yeah. And I think teachers are one of the most underappreciated workers out there. You know, I get that the technology here is primarily the AI-based. Where does the data come from?
The data comes from, for example, like when we take on a district, it is hundreds of thousands of kids. It is on their parents' phones. The kids are using it. There is about 5,000 or 6,000 teachers in each district. They're using it every day. One teacher executing one class generates hundreds of data points. That's where all of the data comes from. But then more importantly, not just from schools, we've got this public-facing product. And imagine if 10 million users are using it to learn, you start to develop some kind of patterns. So that's where you curate this huge dataset. And that kind of like drives the improvement of the model.
