Azota is solving exam headaches for Vietnam’s teachers – TechCrunch

Creating and grading checks is one of the most time-consuming duties teachers will need to offer with. In Vietnam, a startup known as Azota wishes to support with an on the web software program platform that not only allows educators build and proctor checks, but also quickly grades them applying information from Vietnamese educating elements. The business introduced now it has lifted $2.4 million in pre-Sequence A funding led by GGV Capital, with participation from Nextrans and returning investor Do Ventures. 

Started final calendar year, Azota now counts 700,000 academics and 10 million students in main, secondary and substantial schools between its people. It suggests that throughout peak check intervals, it serves around 6 million customers every single thirty day period, or about 30% of the full number of instructors and learners in Vietnam. It promises it can lower down the grading system from two several hours when accomplished manually to just two minutes. 

Azota’s generation arrived amidst the pandemic in 2021. Prior to co-founding the startup, Au Nguyen, its CEO, labored for Viettel, a person of the premier telecoms in Vietnam. He led an academic unit on school management solutions, but recognized that educators had lots of suffering factors that his workforce could not solve. As a final result, he resolved to crew up with his friends, Dai Nguyen and Hung Le, to make Azota. 

“As the crew sees it, there are two main scopes of get the job done for instructors: instructing and assigning and grading checks,” they told TechCrunch in an e mail. “During the COVID instances, instructing experienced to go online, and there ended up quite a few resources to aid this alter this kind of as Zoom, Google Satisfy, Microsoft Group, and so forth. But when it arrives to on the internet assigning and grading, there ended up few instruments out there, which manufactured the course of action really labor-intensive and time-consuming.” 

Azota created an optical character recognition app to automatically recognize Q&A’s from examination pictures taken from teachers’ telephones. It shuffles these questions and responses to build hundreds of modified exam combos. Because the OCR was constructed applying Vietnamese teaching components, the team reported it can understand Vietnamese assessments with a 99% accuracy level. 

Azota’s founders are also working on a a lot more highly developed query bank options that will let academics to decide on and selected from its stock to generate examinations from scratch. 

The startup is applied by educators throughout the country, with about 22% coming from the important towns of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and the relaxation distributed similarly amid all provinces in Vietnam, they extra. 

The team identifies two principal groups of competitors. The first are huge companies that supply discovering management software package (LMS) to colleges, but they say it’s even now a fragmented market place in Vietnam with distinct businesses dominating diverse regions.

The second are startups that offer resources for instructors, but Azota’s founders say the teaching device section is still early and Azota differentiates by working with a item-led growth product, solving teachers’ primary difficulties as they increase, specially for assigning and grading, as a substitute of attempting to handle just about every difficulty that comes up. 

In a geared up statement, GGV Cash world wide managing lover Jixun Foo said, “Using technological know-how to empower lecturers to educate much better, Azota makes terrific instruction accessible to hundreds of thousands of students. They can unleash the legitimate probable of instructors to groom the next generation of Vietnamese youth.”