1. How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person? We have known each other since 2015. We met during our undergraduate degree in Georgia Tech and were also roommates. 2. Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain. The code and technical work for the product is done by both of the co-founders. Vignesh handles the web application while Likhit is responsible for the AI models. 3. Please record a one minute video introducing the founder(s) 4. Company name Ira Project 5. Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less Building AI proof assessments for the 21st Century 6. Company url iraproject.com 7. If you have a demo, attach it below 8. Please provide a link to the product, if relevant. app.iraproject.com [email protected] | asdf1234 9. What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do? We are building AI proof assessments that test for 21st century skills. Rather than asking a test taker to answer questions our assessments require them to explain concepts to Ira, our AI. Using the explanation given by them, Ira attempts to solve a set of questions. The test takers iterate on their explanations till Ira is able to solve all the questions correctly. 10. Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC? Bangalore, India / San Francisco, USA 11. Explain your decision regarding location. The founders are currently based out of different locations. Vignesh lives in Bangalore, India while Likhit is in Atlanta. We want the company to be in San Francisco so we can be close to the cutting edge in AI. 12. How far along are you? We have gone through one product iteration after testing with a design partner in India and have started the sales process. We currently have five leads and have developed Algebra 1 coursework aligned with Common Core Standards to deploy in these schools. 13. How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain. Vignesh has been working on the product full time since April. Likhit has been working full time since May. 14. What tech stack are you using, or planning to use, to build this product? We're using NextJS deployed on Vercel for our web application. For Ira, we have build out our proprietary symbolic computation engine that integrates with a fine-tuned LLM. 15. Are people using your product? When will you have a version people can use? We had a set of unpaid pilots in India. We have a classroom ready version with Algebra 1 coursework. We are trying to get our first few customers in US schools. 16. If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea? The product remains the same but we have built out the entire Algebra I coursework. We also iterated a few times on the sales messaging to find what resonates with both teachers and schools. 17. If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it. No accelerator with Ira Project. 18. Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making? The idea for Ira Project came out of Vignesh's needs while running his non-profit. As his non-profit grew to 10 learning spaces he found that he could not assess 21st century skills like critical thinking, problem solving and conceptual understanding at scale. Assessment solutions today are multiple choice, test for procedural knowledge, and are solved easily by AI. Initially we validated this problem statement by talking to educators in our network. We then ran several experiments comprising of more than 1000 emails and LinkedIn messages to teachers and school administrators. The messaging that our assessments help disincentivise cheating resonated well. The open rate, response rate and click rate for our emails with this messaging has been much better. Based on current information, this seems to be a "hair on fire" problem. 19. Who are your competitors? What do you understand about your business that they don't? Other companies in the assessment space include ETS, Quizizz, Pearson, etc. Our assessments are better as compared to our competitors for four reasons - 1. Language data gives a richer insight into a student’s thinking as compared to the numerical data or multiple choice data of traditional assignments. 2. LLMs have not been trained on our new type of assessment allowing us to detect AI generated responses. 3. Since we give student’s answers and do not penalise them for mistakes our assessments disincentivise cheating. 4. Students actually learn as they take our assessment. 20. How do or will you make money? How much could you make? Currently, we are planning to charge schools to use our assessments. For each course we plan to charge $500 per year. If we sell an average of 4 courses to 10,000 schools (less than 10% of schools in US), the revenue generated will be $20 million. We also plan to expand our assessments to college-level courses and want to target the testing and assessment market. As of 2023, the size of the global K-12 testing and assessment market was $6.7 Billion and the size of the higher education testing and assessment market was $6.4 billion. 21. Where will most of your initial users be located? United States 22. If you have not formed the company yet, describe the planned equity ownership breakdown among the founders, employees and any other proposed stockholders. If there are multiple founders, be sure to give the proposed equity ownership of each founder and founder title (e.g. CEO). (This question is as much for you as us.) Incorporated a Delaware C Corp Vignesh Prasad, Chief Executive Officer - 43% Likhit Nayak, Chief Technology Officer - 43% ESOP Pool - 14% 23. If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application. One idea was to build an API for Ira to provide recommendation-as-a-service (RaaS) to EdTech content platforms. As of 2023, school districts purchased 2,591 EdTech tools and 67% of these are unused while 98% of them were not used effectively. Learners are not engaging effectively with the content and this is going to get worse with generative AI producing even more content. Ira, being a teachable AI, forms an imprint of each student's understanding and can be paired with a recommendation algorithm to direct students to precise and personalized content on any EdTech platform. This idea would be eventually lead to being a Netflix for educational content where learners can take assessments and receive follow-up content made by EdTech companies or individuals. The other idea was building an assessment tool to help companies test and recruit for the right talent. Employers can effectively evaluate applicants at scale by testing how well they can teach Ira to perform tasks that are required on the job. This would allow them to basically deploy scenario-based assessments (like case interviews) at scale. 24. What convinced you to apply to Y Combinator? Did someone encourage you to apply? Have you been to any YC events? Over the years we've met many YC founders, have watched lots of YC content, and attended a few events. We've heard about the value it can provide. When we saw the recent light cone podcast on how AI companies were built at YC it only reaffirmed our idea on how YC could give us the competitive advantage necessary to build a large company. 25. How did you hear about Y Combinator? We initially heard about YC from our friends in college.