25 August 2022, Bengaluru: Jackett, a global edtech platform first launched in India that uses AI & machine learning to create, personalize and mark student assessments, today announced that it has raised US$1 million in seed funding, led by Forge Ventures, Entrepreneur First and Epic Angels Network, as well as notable angel investors Siu Rui Quek, Co-founder of Carousell, and Projjal Ghatak, Co-Founder of OnLoop.
The funding will be used to continue building Jackett’s operating system for personalized learning, making it available to more teachers and education institutions across India and emerging markets. The funding will help to advance Jackett’s mission to empower teachers everywhere with the tools needed to help them and their students thrive.
As per the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE) report 2019-20, the Indian school education system is one of the largest in the world with more than 1.5 million schools, and the total enrolment of all the schools in the UDISE+ system have crossed 26.45 crore in 2019-20, which is an increase of more than 42 lakh over the previous year 2018-19.
Today, globally teachers spend on average 50 hours per monthcreating and marking classwork and assessments, and potentially more in countries like India, with larger average class sizes. Due to inefficiencies and time constraints, classwork and assessments usually cater to the average level of the class, without resources to personalize and address students’ individual learning needs. Enabling teachers to focus on addressing students’ individual needs is now more important than ever due to the severe impact of learning loss during covid, which UNESCO estimates could cost this generation of students close to $17 Trillion in lifetime earnings.
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Jackett was created to solve this efficiency problem, using AI technology to digitize and automate time-consuming and costly tasks like creating, grading and personalizing assessments. Jackett gives teachers valuable time back to focus on teaching, while creating cost savings for education institutions by reducing administrative costs.
Through Jackett, teachers can scan and digitize assessment questions, create custom and personalized assessments from Jackett’s extensive library, auto-grade online and offline through Jackett’s AI technology, and use smart analytics that provide deeper understanding into student performance over time – helping teachers create personalized, insight-led education plans for every student.
Launched earlier this year, Jackett is already being used by teachers around the world, the majority of whom are based in India, with plans to roll out the platform in additional emerging markets. Early adopters of Jackett have created more than 50,000 assessment questions to date through the platform, saving an estimated 7,000 hours in administration time – allowing teachers to put more time back into personalized learning.
Charlotte Trugdill, CEO and Co-founder of Jackett: “Jackett was born out of a problem faced by teachers and education institutions around the world: teachers are forced to spend too much time on administration and not enough doing the things that truly help students thrive. Education has reached an inflection point where new technologies can help enhance the teaching process, reduce the administrative burden, and ultimately create a better and more personalized learning experience for students, at scale. This new funding will enable us to continue building the next generation of tools that empower teachers to do what they love and help unlock the potential of students around the world.”
Tiang Lim Foo, Partner at Forge Ventures: “The pandemic revealed fault lines in the education system, especially in emerging markets; it also served as a catalyst to digitalisation in classrooms. Jackett is well positioned to take advantage of this momentum with an innovative product. This is evidenced by the “user love” we saw while interviewing early users of Jackett. We are really excited to work with Charlotte, Rachiket and the Jackett team to equip educators across emerging markets to bring education into the future.”
Hester Spiegel, Co-founder of Epic Angels: “We strongly believe that the future of learning will be characterized by hyper-personalisation. Jackett uses tech to allow for greater personalisation for the assessment market, catering to students’ individual learning needs. Meanwhile, teachers are delighted as they are given back time to actually help students learn instead of spending time on admin. We are proud to support Charlotte, who is one of the most resilient founders we’ve met, and her team.
About Jackett:
Jackett is a teacher’s app for everything related to assessments. Right from getting their questions auto-typed, to auto-populating entire assessments, sharing the question papers with their students to auto-marking the responses submitted and generating student insights for a deeper understanding of students’ strengths and weaknesses. Jackett, also seamlessly integrates with teachers’ or institutes’ existing learning management systems. Since launching, more than a thousand teachers have used Jackett to create over 50,000 assessment questions.
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