Stylus, a UK-based startup was launched by a former teacher Dominic Bristow, and has secured £500,000 in seed funding. In this funding round, Sure Valley Ventures was joined by numerous angel investors and involved in the company’s expansion of its unique AI-driven marking solution called LearnCycle. This development is expected to help address the teacher workload challenge prevalent in the UK’s education sector and help increase staff retention through the use of smart systems in the marking process.
Vision and Mission of Stylus
Stylus was established with the noble objective of solving the problem of overwhelming tasks experienced by teachers and enhancing the standards of learning using computers. Dominic Bristow, who was once a secondary school teacher, knows firsthand the burden of marking and fulfilling feedback on the assessments of students. This led him to create a stylus, aimed to use artificial intelligence to automate these processes and give teachers more time to teach. LearnCycle, the flagship offering of GreenShoot, is an automated marking solution that integrates human moderation to offer high-quality feedback to students. This method of making saves time used by teachers in marking but does not affect the quality of feedback that is essential for students learning.
Funding Details
The £500,000 seed funding round was provided by Sure Valley Ventures, a leading VC firm known for investing in the AI industry. The capital will allow Stylus to grow its service and reach more educational institutions in Great Britain. The funding will also be used to enhance features of the LearnCycle platform and to address the needs of educators and students in their usual learning processes.
The successful funding round places Stylus in a perfect place to make major advancements in the edtech industry. By having the support of its partner from Sure Valley Ventures, the company is in a better position to diversify its products of the company and spread its wings across other schools in the country. The development of new features that have been anticipated is expected to revolutionize the efficiency and effectiveness of the educational sector.
Image Source: Stylus
Teacher Workload and Cost Savings for Schools
Stylus seeks to lighten the load for teachers by automating the marking process so they can spend their time and energy on other aspects of teaching. Feedback is considered more valuable for students and their learning and development for high quality. The intelligentStylus solution makes it possible to offer timely feedback to students which in one way, shape, or form helps students in improving on their results as well as engagement. Stylus’ technology can prove greatly beneficial to schools by reducing the amount of time teachers spend correcting homework and other tasks. This would cost roughly £17,000 of teacher time per subject, per year group which makes it around £750, 000 for an entire school.
Leverage of advanced AI technology
Stylus’ LearnCycle platform can analyze paper-based assessments, with the use of sophisticated AI technology. Teachers only glance through the contents of the student papers which are scored by AI and revised by freelance tutors. This process creates individual reports for every learner, providing feedback that is specific to the learner, but it does not take a teacher a lot of time to do this since the papers are automatically marked. The platform is especially useful for schools wherein administering online tests is not feasible, which makes Stylus an indispensable resource for sectors that heavily utilize paper-based tests. As much of the marking is done by the AI, Stylus guarantees that teachers will be able to give quality feedback regardless of the work input required.
Conclusion
The £500,000 seed funding is an achievement in the edtech space, especially for Stylus. Stylus benefits from the backing of Sure Valley Ventures and its aim to use superior AI technology to drastically change the marking experience in school. As the company continues to develop and expand its offerings, it will be exciting to see how Stylus shapes the future of education and empowers teachers to focus on what they do best: teaching.
