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Edia, an AI-powered math education platform, is guaranteeing school districts better student math outcomes within one year of adoption — or they will refund the entire cost. The bold promise reflects the startup’s confidence in its comprehensive solution that leverages artificial intelligence to provide personalized student feedback, equip teachers with real-time data, and enable targeted interventions. The company recently closed a $9.4 million Series A round led by Felicis, with participation from 8VC, Inspired Capital, Susa Ventures, and angels like JD Ross (the founder of Opendoor).
“Rather than just being a solution that’s a single product, where you’re kind of putting kids on it for 20 minutes, Edia is a full solution,” Edia co-founder and CEO Joe Philleo told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “We actually would go to a district and say, ‘What are you trying to achieve?’ Implement Edia across your 6th to 12th grade classes, and if you don’t achieve better outcomes within one year, it’s totally free.”
A key differentiator is Edia’s ability to let students type out and show their math work directly on Chromebooks — a feature inspired by tools for typing out complex Chinese and Japanese characters. “If you want to type an exponent, you can just start typing ‘exponent’, ‘e-x-p’, and the exponent will pop up right away. You just press enter and it creates it,” explained Philleo. “It means it’s effortless to type math on a computer.”
Edia then uses AI to provide step-by-step guidance if a student is stuck, as well as personalized feedback on the student’s own work, pinpointing exact mistakes. “It will read the student’s work and be able to compare that to the actual solution,” said Philleo. “It can identify, oh, there’s where you made a mistake. It’s not just ‘hey, you got it wrong, read the explanation, watch the video’ — it’s ‘you got it wrong because you added the exponents rather than multiplying them.’”
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Real-time proficiency predictions
Beyond feedback, Edia’s AI predicts each student’s proficiency on state learning standards based on their work in the platform. In the 2017-2018 school year alone, students answered more than 200 million questions on Edia. “We can train a model to predict, based on all the work students have ever done on the program, how likely are students to do well on any given standard,” said Philleo. “It’s really shockingly accurate.”
Armed with this real-time, predictive data, teachers can promptly form small groups to provide targeted support and practice. School administrators can also quickly identify at-risk students who need additional resources like tutoring. This contrasts with the quarterly benchmark assessments many districts currently rely on.
“A lot of districts, they would do these quarterly assessments or quarterly benchmarks, where they would figure out once a quarter where their students are at,” said Philleo. “The CTO of Dallas ISD calls that ‘post-mortem data’, because by the time you get this quarterly benchmark, you’re looking back on it like, it’s too late. In contrast, with Edia, teachers are getting real-time data.”
Taking on incumbents with a bold guarantee
With its comprehensive platform and money-back guarantee, Edia hopes to capitalize on the massive digital shift happening in K-12 education. Coming out of the pandemic, districts are equipped with Chromebooks for every student and investing heavily in learning interventions to address widening achievement gaps. Edia has already found eager customers, with school districts in Virginia using the platform to identify students for the state’s $400 million tutoring initiative.
However, Edia faces entrenched competitors like Khan Academy, IXL, and DreamBox Learning who have long dominated the digital math market. The company will need to prove it can deliver better results to win over districts. Philleo believes Edia’s modern, mobile-first architecture and teacher-empowering approach will ultimately prevail against rivals built for an earlier era. “A lot of those programs are really built for what I call a computer lab era,” he said. “Edia is the only solution that’s architected to be this full foundational workflow for teachers and districts to use in math.”
If Edia’s AI can consistently boost scores on state math tests, it could emerge as a leader in the coming wave of algorithm-driven education. School districts should closely track Edia’s results to see if the young company makes good on its ambitious guarantee.