Sana Learning Platform

Global skills shortages and inefficiencies are inevitable in a rapidly changing world. With little time for upskilling and reskilling, workers across sectors are poorly equipped to keep up with the changing job market and technological advances. Learning is inefficient, meaning learners lack engagement, and mastery, if reached, is rarely maintained. 

Ranked best-in-world for identifying knowledge gaps, Sana’s AI provides optimal content at the optimal time to maintain engagement and boost knowledge retention. Integrating seamlessly with learning platforms, Sana ensures each learner: reaches proficiency at their own pace, masters the same content in half the time and remembers it three times longer. 

Sana empowers any internet-connected business to ensure their learners have the skills they need to keep up, transition, or go further in a rapidly changing world. From boosting resuscitation proficiency in remote hospitals to reskilling nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sana optimises the world’s most valuable resource- human capital.

According to BCG, the skills mismatch affects 1.3 billion people worldwide, and imposes a 6% annual tax on the global economy in the form of lost productivity. By 2022, 27% of available roles are forecast to be in jobs which don’t yet exist and skills are becoming obsolete at an increasing rate, in many cases in less than five years. 

It is more pressing than ever to ensure employers and employees can keep pace through reskilling and upskilling. Businesses’ time and resource constraints mean traditional learning approaches are neglected and, when adopted, inefficient. A lack of engagement results in slow mastery, while prolonged courses result in poor knowledge retention.

A human-centric approach is crucial to overcoming these challenges. Workers must be enabled to acquire fundamental skill sets and engage in lifelong learning, ensuring long-term skills liquidity in response to changing employer and market requirements. It has long been recognised that there is a need to shift from “mass standardization” to “mass uniqueness” to overcome the skills mismatch and ensure human capital realisation. Recognising individuals as distinct personalities rather than economic resources ensures their full potential is nurtured, encouraging “workers” to become “contributors”: unique additions to both economy and society. 

Sana Labs’ Adaptive Learning Platform provides a user-centric experience for learners and powerful authoring and analytics capabilities for employers. Sana’s models comprehensively capture both learning needs, from knowledge and remediation to repetition and progression, and content factors, including content dependencies, difficulty, assessment and instructional value. In doing so, Sana creates fully personalised and adaptive learning experiences.

Learners undergo a three-stage journey to mastery: adaptive assessments which pinpoint their current knowledge and confidence in up to 75% fewer questions than benchmarks; individually personalized learning paths which continuously assess proficiency, resulting in 15-45% greater learning outcomes; and targeted retention exercises, improving long-term retention by 3-4x. 

Administrators are empowered in real-time with: actionable insights and rich learning analytics, allowing them to engage personally with learners; grouping of users into roles and courses into paths, automating course assignment and improving follow-up; and a powerful authoring tool which enables data-driven recommendations for content improvement. 

Sana’s platform is powered by state-of-the-art AI which combines learner and content modelling with individual learning paths and ‘nudging’ towards courses aligned with learning objectives. Alongside integrated learning analytics and actionable insights, Sana’s deep content modelling provides data-driven content improvement recommendations, optimizing assessment efficacy as well as content, delivery and remediation.

Sana serves workers in sectors ranging from healthcare and pharma to financial and professional services. Whether ensuring proficiency and skill compliance, reskilling or upskilling, Sana ensures learning is personalized to each individual learner. Represented by the diversity of our clients and partners, we have developed a deep understanding of the needs of the global workforce. We engage continuously with employers and employees alike, both integrating our end-to-end solution into their existing platforms, and helping them author courses directly. Nurturing long term relationships, we iterate on and refine our solutions to meet learners’ needs, whether integrating course ‘nudges’ to promote self-led learning, aligning dashboard metrics with client KPIs or integrating automated course pathways for minimal supervision. 

We envision a world of truly lifelong learners capable of mastering new disciplines, transitioning careers and augmenting their daily lives through intuitive and stimulating learning. Whether learning a new language, mastering new skills for a promotion, or leveraging existing skills to break into new sectors, we ensure our learners stay engaged for longer, reach mastery sooner, and retain it for longer. Our affordable, accessible and scalable solution seeks to empower the “workers” of today to become “shapers” of tomorrow, regardless of income, culture or  background.

Sana’s personalized learning platform directly addresses skill and knowledge shortages associated with time and resource-constrained businesses and workers in dynamic markets. Sana enables businesses to upskill and reskill their workforce as they adopt new technologies and methodologies, or diversify product offerings. Harnessing existing experience, personalized learning paths also enable workers to obtain durable skills rapidly and reskill independently to meet evolving market demand. Indirectly, Sana’s ease of integration makes it well-suited to small businesses in untapped communities. By accelerating human capital development, Sana simultaneously increases global communities’ resilience to shocks and provides them with the tools to innovate and prosper.

Our solution is innovate as it brings an unbiased outcome-based approach to education. Similar solutions to ours primarily measure success on seat-time (e.g. how much time someone has spent on a particular module), or they measure a learner's self-confidence in knowledge acquired (e.g. surveying learners after completing a module on how much they've learned). However, our solution is unique in that it objectively measures how much a learner knows, creates an unbiased and adapted learning curriculum based on their unique knowledge gaps, and models their knowledge decay based on how difficult the content is and their historical knowledge retention. 

Our core technology is built on Bayesian IRT models coupled with a rules-based engine to create an artificially-intelligent learning experience.

Sana's core components include adaptive assessments, which accurately pinpoint knowledge gaps for individual learners; adaptive learning paths, which deliver personalized learning curriculums in real-time; and knowledge retention models, which estimate the half-life of the acquired knowledge for a specific learner.

In addition to the adaptive learning experience, we also support browse and search, with the search powered by a deep learning algorithm that surfaces results based on imprecise search terms, badly indexed data, and retrieves courses with minimal metadata.

These core components are built on a world-class infrastructure capable of supporting millions of learners simultaneously, offering personalization and personalized learning analytics in real-time.

• Bayesian IRT models are used in high-stakes exams such as the GMAT and GRE in the USA.
• Deep learning search algorithms are used extensively in web browsers world-wide.
• Modelling the half-life of an individual's knowledge is a technique that builds on the work of optimizing spaced repetition intervals researched by many learning science and cognitive science academics worldwide. 

While upskilling nurses for optimal COVID-19 treatment, we found that nurses were able to effectively demonstrate mastery of content in 50% less time than if studying via a traditional linear approach.

The theory of change goes that traditional learning is not always adapted to the needs of the learner, unless the adaptivity is driven by a very involved teacher who spends a lot of time understanding the learner's knowledge gaps and then tailoring the content to meet these knowledge gaps. By harnessing AI and machine learning, we provide a scalable solution that can address individual learner needs worldwide and in real-time.

We currently serve 60k learners, and expect to reach 120k by the next year, and 2 million in 5 years.

In the next year, we intend to broaden our learner base to consolidate the proven efficacy of our solution across a greater breadth of sectors and geographies, focussing in particular on meeting the growing and evolving needs of global healthcare. 

Our long-term impact goals are to expand the educational content on our adaptive learning platform from proficiency, upskilling and reskilling, to include other socially-relevant topics such as building awareness of LGBTQ+, Civil Rights, and cultural norms. In doing so, we intend to reach not only healthcare and business professionals, but learners across all industries and from all backgrounds who can also benefit from learning topics which can help them become better global citizens. 

We plan to partner with organizations who specialize in building awareness of these socially relevant topics, and look to leverage our adaptive learning platform to bring their educational content to scale.  

Our biggest hurdle will be ensuring the financial runway to sufficiently take our adaptive learning platform to market. We will require additional investment in our platform, team, and content development.

We plan to overcome these barriers by finding partners who can help fund the journey, either from fees that come from licensing our platform, revenue share models from selling courses through our adaptive learning platform, or investing in our company for equity shares.

N/A.

Our team consists of:

22 Full-time;

3 Part-time; and

2 Contractors.

We have hired engineers who previously developed music recommendation algorithm and the backend infrastructure to support it, as well as ex-Googlers who developed deep learning search, as well as data scientists from BCG Gamma, Harvard University, and Imperial College.

By combining the diverse approaches of our technical talent from across these domains, we believe we are well-positioned to bring an innovative new approach to learning science.

We are partnering with Mount Sinai Health Systems in NYC, King Faisal Hospital in Saudi Arabia, and Karolinska Institute in Sweden, to upskill nurses in optimal treatment for COVID-19.

We are also working together with smaller hospitals across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Oceania, and South America to deliver specialist training in response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to this, we partner with some of the world's largest Pharma, financial and education services companies.

We provide our customers with a platform product which creates an on-demand adaptive learning experience, provides analytics on learner performance and content richness, and enables administrators to author content in an adaptive-integrated method.

We also provide services which include the integration of existing content into our adaptive learning platform, and the integration of our adaptive learning system into other systems in the customer's ecosystem.

Customers ask for our product and services because they want to transform their learning experience to achieve better learning outcomes.

We will fund our work primarily through grants and through selling our product.  

As we seek to scale our solution even more rapidly to meet the demands of an increasingly rapidly changing workforce, we may also raise more investment capital over time. 

Our greatest barrier is our capital constraint. 

While the Solve prize money will inevitably help us invest in scaling and improving our technical capacity through R&D, the Solve network itself promises substantial opportunities both for revenue growth and innovation aligned with our long-term goals.

In particular, becoming a Solve team offers the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration with Solve alumni, across a breadth of complementary domains including: community-driven innovation, teaching & education, frontlines of health and work/workplaces of the future. By sharing intellectual and human capital with fellow "Solvers" and the global MIT network, we intend to realise the full societal scope of personalized learning as a tool for citizen inclusion and integration, as well as professional growth and economic development. This not only enables us to serve a broader scope of clients, and thereby pursue diversified revenue streams which help long-term financial profitability and sustainability, but validates our mission and efficacy. 

Thus, becoming a Solve team is likely not only to directly alleviate our financial capital constraints, but energise and augment our existing R&D efforts to better serve our existing clients and acquire new ones across new domains, and increase both our brand awareness and commercial exposure. 

Our primary partnership goals are, in the short-term, healthcare, life sciences, and professional and financial services clients seeking to ensure proficiency, skill improvements and skill diversification. This is a substantial global market which has long employed outdated "one-size-fits-all" online learning platforms which are inefficient and result in poor engagement and utilisation. This provides a substantial opportunity for our personalized approach to drive significant learning gains. 

In the long-term, we seek to partner with public sector companies, governments and non-profits to roll-out personalized learning technologies as tools for civic engagement and economic development, especially supporting vulnerable citizens and those occupying untapped communities or within developing economies. 

The initiatives we’d like to partner with are: UNHCR, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and Teach For All, each of which have personalized learning at scale as one of their key focus areas. A partnership seems natural and would give Sana Labs additional power to be part of a worldwide learning solution alongside established players in development and emerging market innovation.

The organizations we’d like to partner with are Fortune 500 companies that experience a strong need to upskill and reskill their workforce, such as but not limited to General Motors, Walmart and Verizon. With the Sana Platform, they can ensure their employees not only thrive in their existing roles, but are capable of developing rapidly to occupy new essential roles within the organization, rather than having to lay employees off due as their skill sets become outdated. Consequently, we believe the  Sana platform is well positioned to ensure long-term skill liquidity: the most vulnerable low-income individuals dependent on these organizations for survival being empowered to grow their skill set and stay employed.

Naturally we also aim to partner with more pharma and healthcare organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, United Health Group and CVS Health. As stated previously we have proven the impact of our solution in this category and envision fruitful partnerships in multiple domains.

Refugees are regularly neglected as social outsiders and economic dependents. Poor public learning infrastructure prevents refugees, often highly skilled professionals, from reaching their full potential. Interdependent language, cultural and skill barriers hinder effective sociopolitical integration or economic participation. 

Personalization is inherently decommodifying, empowering refugees to become active members of their community and participants in the local economy. Instead of interacting with refugees as unskilled illiterates, Sana is capable of enabling learners to leverage their existing skills, in their native language, to map their expertise into new contexts as the market demands. Where traditionally, language mastery is a pre-requisite of retraining, Sana is capable of providing simultaneous linguistic, cultural and professional learning through complementary courses in language, social norms and civic process. Refugees are empowered to learn independently,  directly improving their communication and language in practical contexts. This aspect of self-determination is unique to personalized learning and ensures that refugees can realise their own ambitions by application and augmentation of existing skills within new domains.

Consequently, Sana intends to use the prize to increase our capacity to:

• expand our product internationally, specifically to remote and untapped communities
• ensure we reach and secure engagement with civic organisations, non-profits and governments who can roll-out our solution to the most needy
• dedicate resources to working closely with refugee communities to optimise our learning solutions to their needs

Harnessing this prize, we envisage numerous applications for Sana as a tool for accelerating and consolidating refugees' social integration and ensuring full realisation of their economic potential. 

As previously discussed, the global skills mismatch is detrimental to global efficiency and economic stability. Businesses’ time and resource constraints mean traditional learning approaches are neglected and, when adopted, inefficient. A lack of engagement results in slow mastery, while prolonged courses result in poor knowledge retention.

Whether reskilling nurses as COVID-19 specialists, ensuring doctors remain resuscitation-proficient, upskilling engineers seeking to integrate sustainable technologies, or accelerating the financial compliance process, Sana solves learning, and thus organisational, inefficiencies. 

By ensuring workers can adapt quickly to the changing needs of the market, of their employers and firms, and realise their professional ambitions, Sana ensures skill liquidity. Thus, Sana promotes the emergence of a global workforce capable of reskilling, upskilling and maintaining proficiency in essential skills. Inevitably, this results not only in greater innovation, but greater resilience to economic downturns: workers and firms alike being optimally equipped to capitalise off emerging opportunities presented by technological change, market volatility and economic shocks. 

Consequently, Sana intends to use the prize to:

• increase our global competitiveness through internationalisation and innovation support services
• source international business, technology, and research partners, particularly to diversify our client base and footprint to a breadth of non-EU partners
• improve our awareness of and access to opportunities for further financing of our solution

Literacy is at the heart of global development. While lack of traditional literacy prevents citizens from participating fully in society by prohibiting access to basic education, contemporary illiteracy is digital and inhibits global integration, communication and collaboration. The illiterate are most vulnerable to displacement with few opportunities to reskill, upskill or adapt to the changing world around them. Inevitably, this vicious cycle of illiteracy, economic displacement and vulnerability is at the heart of modern poverty. 

Entirely content agnostic and accessible at low-cost to any learner with an internet connection, Sana is well-equipped to improve both traditional and digital literacy rates. Further, Sana offers the powerful capacity to allow communities to harness cutting-edge natural language processing and state-of-the-art AI to personalize their own courses intuitively and easily. This means native communities are capable of adopting scalable personalization for a breadth of applications, including education campaigns which, since the popularisation of major conditional cash transfer schemes such as PROGRESA (Gertler, 2002) have long been recognised to successfully promote essential human capital augmenting practices in the developing world. 

Consequently, Sana intends to use the prize to:

• expand our product internationally, specifically to remote and untapped communities
• ensure we reach and secure engagement with civic organisations, non-profits and governments who can roll-out our solution to the most needy
• dedicate resources to working closely with communities facing low adult literacy rates to optimise our learning solutions to their needs

Harnessing recent breakthroughs in the fields of deep learning and natural language processing, Sana has developed a proven track-record of successful content-agnostic personalization of learning. Our powerful AI-driven solutions are low-cost, scalable and require minimal physical infrastructure. Courses can be taken and created on mobile devices with an internet connection and are capable of ensuring all learners master the same content in half the time and remember it three times longer.

We have demonstrated the ability to reskill nurses into COVID-19 specialists in half the time of conventional approaches and are seeking to maximise the impact of our platform to benefit socioeconomic advancement and prosperity wherever possible.

Notable applications, particularly in untapped communities in developing countries include literacy training and public education campaigns. Globally, our platform is suited for integration into education, from early child development to K-12, high school and university-level courses, as well as public services such as language training, upskilling and reskilling, particularly for vulnerable or disadvantaged groups such as refugees. 

We envisage our platform being employed by NGO's and non-profits, as well as governments and private sector companies worldwide. Particularly in untapped markets, the returns to personalized education are likely to be outsized and, so far, are largely unexplored. 

Consequently, Sana intends to use the prize to:

• explore the full scope of potential applications for the Sana platform in untapped communities worldwide, specifically focused on development applications, including but not limited to public health and education campaigns
• expand our product internationally, specifically to remote and untapped communities
• ensure we reach and secure engagement with civic organisations, non-profits and governments who can roll-out our solution to the most needy
• dedicate resources to working closely with communities facing low adult literacy rates to optimise our learning solutions to their needs
• source international business, technology, and research partners, particularly to diversify our client base and footprint to a breadth of non-EU partners
• improve our awareness of and access to opportunities for further financing of our solution, particularly via the public sector and in emerging market economies such as Brazil, India, China and Sub-Saharan Africa

Harnessing recent breakthroughs in the fields of deep learning and natural language processing, Sana has developed a proven track-record of successful content-agnostic personalization of learning. Our powerful AI-driven solutions are low-cost, scalable and require minimal physical infrastructure. Courses can be taken and created on mobile devices with an internet connection and are capable of ensuring all learners master the same content in half the time and remember it three times longer.

We have demonstrated the ability to reskill nurses into COVID-19 specialists in half the time of conventional approaches and are seeking to maximise the impact of our platform to benefit socioeconomic advancement and prosperity wherever possible.

Notable applications, particularly in untapped communities in developing countries include literacy training and public education campaigns. Globally, our platform is suited for integration into education, from early child development to K-12, high school and university-level courses, as well as public services such as language training, upskilling and reskilling of refugees. Instead of interacting with citizens or workers mere economic capital, Sana enables learners to leverage their existing skills to map their expertise into new contexts and domains to meet the needs of the societies and economies they operate in.   

We envisage our platform being employed by NGO's and non-profits, as well as governments and private sector companies worldwide. Particularly in untapped markets, the returns to personalized education are likely to be outsized and, so far, are largely unexplored. 

Consequently, Sana intends to use the prize to:

• explore the full scope of potential applications for the Sana platform in untapped communities worldwide, specifically focused on development applications, including but not limited to public health and education campaigns
• expand our product internationally, specifically to remote and untapped communities
• ensure we reach and secure engagement with civic organisations, non-profits and governments who can roll-out our solution to the most needy
• dedicate resources to working closely with communities facing low adult literacy rates to optimise our learning solutions to their needs
• source international business, technology, and research partners, particularly to diversify our client base and footprint to a breadth of non-EU partners
• improve our awareness of and access to opportunities for further financing of our solution, particularly via the public sector and in emerging market economies such as Brazil, India, China and Sub-Saharan Africa