CoTeach

The problem we are solving is three-fold:

1. Math proficiency is worsening in the US and across the globe.

a. According to the National Science Foundation in 2013, only 35% of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in math. That means 7 million middle-school students aren't proficient in math. According to the NAEP (2022), this is now 28%. 

b. The stats are worse for black and Hispanic students in 2022. Only 9% of black students are proficient in math, 13% for American Indian / Alaska Native students and 14% for Hispanic (NAEP 2022).

c. Globally the OECD (2023) reported an unprecedented decline in math skills compared to 2018 performance fell by 15 points in math, a loss equivalent to three-quarters of a year's worth of learning.

2. There is a teacher shortage impacting educational quality and access.

a. In the U.S. 9 in 10 public schools struggle to hire teachers and the National Education Association (NEA) found 55% of educators want to leave teaching earlier than they originally planned due to burnout and massive labor shortage. the NCES (2024) also reported that most schools stated the biggest challenge in hiring teachers was the lack of qualified candidates and too few applying.

b. Globally we need 44 million teachers by 2030 (UNESCO, 2024), with sub-Saharan Africa being impacted the most, where 15 million teachers are needed. The teacher shortage creates oversized classes, education disparities, financial strain on schools & families impacting educational quality and access.

3. Access to high quality math teachers, including as private tutors, is expensive and exclusive.

a. For families who can afford to remediate math proficiency levels, access to the best math tutors comes at a high cost, families pay up to $9,000 per year for private tuition. Only 2% of families in the U.S. can afford access to such high quality math tutors (Rapaport & Silver, 2023). 

Our solution is a world-class teacher in your pocket. It is an an AI co-teacher that helps tutor students in mathematics. Using our web application, students have a tutoring session with our AI co-teacher named Zoe on their mobile, tablet or computer device. Students send pictures of their math assignment to Zoe or simply asks Zoe to review a concept of topic they need help with, and Zoe teaches them how to solve the math problems by breaking down the problem for the student, and guides them through the solution. Zoe also generates practice problems at the student's level and shares feedback on their errors. We took the approach of human-centric design when building Zoe's AI, ensuring that Zoe provides positive reinforcement and encouragement like a caring teacher would. We leverage LLMs and proprietary AI techniques to achieve highly customized tutoring sessions that makes students feel like they're talking to a real teacher that adjusts to their level of understanding.  

Our solution currently serves middle-school students. We are working directly with a diverse group of students across grades 5-8 across the U.S. including white, asian, black and hispanic students. Additionally, a number of students participating in the pilot are neurodivergent students. We have seen a 36% improvement in math test scores reported by students after working with Zoe weekly for one month. Students are highly engaged spending 20-60mins per session with Zoe. We see the sessions particularly long if students have just learned a new concept and need Zoe's help to review conceptual understanding and do practice questions. 

The students we are working with are underserved for the following reasons: 1. Parents are working full-time and not available to help at home;
2. Attend schools with oversized classes;
3. Students are lower-level math students who are introverted and afraid to ask for help in class;
4. Certain on-demand private tutor apps that the parents have used have not worked for their child; and 
5. Parents cannot afford high quality math tutors, and are unable to get high-quality assistance on an ad-hoc basis especially if the parents are not proficient in math themselves. 

Our CTO, Rachiket quit building AI for a robotics lab and I quit my Partner position at Meta - to transform education using Artificial Intelligence. We’re both outliers from small towns in Thailand & India, he was 1 in 10,000 kids to win a 6-year scholarship in Singapore, sent a satellite to space and won the airbus innovation award for his algorithms. I'm the first woman in my family to finish higher education and at 25yo was heading Meta’s Indochina business, built it from the ground up, zero to $X0m in the first year. Hired & managed a team of 15 people across India, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh.

We met in Feb'21 at the start of the Entrepreneur First incubator, after testing out different teams, we met for tea and pitched similar ideas to each other. His idea was to leverage data in the classroom to automate a teacher’s tasks, my idea was to personalise education based on a students’ weaknesses, interests & learning styles.

Going from home school to regular school, I felt stupid being in the lower math group and gave up, teachers didn’t have time to help and neither of my parents finished high-school so they were unable to help me through the learning process. When Rachiket moved to Singapore, he felt guilty realising the disparity in attention he got from his teachers compared to friends from his village in India. In 2021 we started with our belief that the future of learning must be personalised - so no student is left behind. That same year, there was an unprecedented adoption inflection of tech in every classroom in the World, then in 2023 openAI releases GPT4. We are at the cross-section of a technology and adoption inflection point and leverage this to make personalised education universally accessible. 

We have both spent the last 2 years working with thousands of teachers to help automate their workflows and help them become more efficient with an automated testing and grading software. Through this experience we deeply understand a teacher's process and how AI can be leveraged to help teachers scale their impact and attention to more students. Teachers we've worked with want the best for their students by any means and this propelled us to investigate how we could leverage our expertise in AI to personalize a great teacher's attention and feedback at scale to make the best teachers accessible to ever student. In the past 6 months, we've spent hundreds of hours with students, teachers and parents across the U.S. to understand what makes a great teacher and ensure that we bring the best aspects of the best math teachers into developing Zoe, which will be accessible to families at anywhere at anytime, at a fraction of the cost for them. 

1. We have built a working AI application and web-application interface.

2. We are in closed-beta testing with 10+ families interacting with both the students and their parents in collecting their feedback to improve the product. Additionally, our advisors include award-winning teachers who help review the feedback and prioritize key solutions to develop.

3. We have achieved a 90 NPS from the students and parents, this is up from 50 NPS when we launched the beta product in Q1 2024. 

We are applying to solve as we are looking for partners who can help us with distribution on the b2b and potentially b2g front for example: 

• Find private school, charter school and/or public school distribution partners.
• Find school design partners to test and develop research around the positive impact AI will have on supplementary learning in resource-constrained environments.
• Support in being connected with specialists in the field to join our advisory board to ensure alignment of our product development with pedagogical best practices, learning science and cognitive science. 

Our approach at CoTeach is unique, we work with award-winning math teachers to reverse engineer their effective teaching techniques and behaviours. We unbundle the tasks that they do as teachers, and execute these tasks using a proprietary techniques we've developed leveraging AI agents. Additionally, human-centric design is at the core of Zoe's interaction with students, essentially modelling the teacher's behaviour of active listening, engaging critical thinking, positive reinforcement and encouragement. 

Our solution will create a significantly larger market for private tutoring by making it cheaper and accessible to many more people, whilst ensure that Zoe is as effective as a world-class math teacher. Everyone should be able to afford high-quality math tutors, not just 2% of families in the country. Additionally, our solution will help schools that have teacher shortages, or where teachers are burned out due to oversized classes and workload. We will be able to provide a more cost-effective solution to schools for supplementary learning and support teachers in intervention programs. For schools our solution is unique as will be able to adapt to the teacher's lesson notes, to ensure that the strategies the teacher is delivering is also executed in the supplementary learning programs and support parents at home. 

Our solution, is a practical and accessible way to address the issue of declining math proficiency among middle-school students. How and why we expect it to make a significant impact:

1. Learning loss: math proficiency rates are low, especially among underserved racial groups. Zoe helps bridge this gap by offering personalized tutoring that adapts to each student's individual learning pace and style, improving their understanding and skills in mathematics.

2. Helping with teacher shortages: Zoe serves as an accessible resource that supplements the reduced educational workforce and can help relieve pressure on schools and teachers. Ensuring that students receive consistent and reliable math tutoring to supplement their teachers efforts at school. 

3. Accessibility: high-quality math tutoring is often expensive and not an option for most families. Zoe provides a cost-effective alternative, making top-tier math education accessible to students regardless of their economic background. This is particularly impactful for students from low-income families who are disproportionately affected by educational disparities.

4. Fostering math confidence: designed to engage students in a positive and encouraging manner, which is crucial for learning. By providing immediate feedback and support, Zoe helps build confidence and reduces the anxiety associated with challenging math concepts.

Large Language Models, AI agents and agentic workflows. 

1. Co-founder & CEO: full-time

2. Co-founder & CTO: full-time

3. AI Scientist: full-time 

4. Full-stack engineer: full-time 

5. Product marketing: part-time 

We've been working on Artificial Intelligence in education for 2.5 years. Specifically for CoTeach we have been working on this solution for the past 6 months. 

We will have a b2c and b2b subscription model that will be tiered pricing based on light or heavy usage, subscriptions will be on a per student user basis. 

We have raised over $1m in pre-seed venture capital funding from investors including 500 Global in the U.S. and Forge Ventures in Singapore. Our angel investors include folks from Microsoft, Meta and KKR.