5-5-5: Gil Quadros Flores from CoGrader

Gil Quadros Flores , co-founder of CoGrader , was one of the five founders picked by ECMC Group and gener8tor to receive a $100,000 investment and take part in the 2024 OnRamp Education & Workforce Innovation Accelerator.

CoGrader uses AI to help teachers save up to 80% of time spent grading and provide personalized feedback and grades to improve student outcomes.

For our five questions for five innovative companies in a five minute read series, we asked Gil five questions:

What inspired you to start your company?

CoGrader was born out of frustration with the grading process: Gil comes from a family of educators and watched his family sacrifice weekends for endless grading, and Gabriel, a former English teacher, shared the same dread during unpaid overtime. CoGrader is creating a future where teachers can focus on teaching and supporting students with individualized learning.

What impact will tech/AI have on education over the next five years?

Educators across the country are overwhelmed and burning out. Grading specifically, can take up to a quarter of their working time. This not only encroaches on their personal time (nights and weekends) but also results in less support for students, diminished teaching quality and educators leaving the classroom. This pain point has not been adequately addressed because AI/LLM (Large Language Models) was not good enough to automate and personalize grading at scale. More holistically, AI will empower teachers to teach better and support students on their individualized learning paths.

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What has been the biggest challenge you’ve faced in growing your company, and how did you overcome it?

The main product challenge this market faces is quality, consistency and accuracy of feedback and grades. Building a quality AI grading platform is a non-trivial technical challenge. Writing and grading incumbents have tried building an AI grader and then came asking for our API after they realized how hard it quickly gets (early results in AI are always encouraging and then reality kicks in). Product-led growth will win because it is challenging to build a good product with top-notch feedback. CoGrader has been heads down on improving the quality, consistency and accuracy of feedback and grades, and now leverages state-of-the-art AI technology called multi-agent collaboration systems.

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Can you share a success story where your product made a significant impact on a student’s learning journey?

A teacher who used CoGrader consistently throughout the school year said this:

“I had one student as a sophomore last year, who was historically disengaged in English class. He struggled with dyslexia, anxiety around writing, as well as a processing disorder that made writing very difficult for him. The feedback from CoGrader was transformative. Toward the beginning of the year, I was able to personalize the feedback for all my students, but I took extra care with students like this one. His feedback needed to be shorter, more concrete and more encouraging. As the year progressed, I used CoGrader’s features to switch to more conceptual feedback that was oriented toward the writing process. The feedback evolved into questions about his ideas. Because of the time I saved, CoGrader enabled me to probe the content of his thoughts and encourage deeper thinking while pushing him to question his own writing style. With practice, patience and timely feedback from CoGrader, that student ended the year with a deep and abiding interest in the humanities. His mom sent me an email, thanking me for the encouragement, the motivation and the personalized writing coaching he got. Without CoGrader, none of that would’ve been possible.”

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What has been the highlight of the first half of 2024?

- Launching the new product, which leverages state-of-the-art AI technology and allows teachers to personalize CoGrader to their own voice.

- Growing 10x, partnering with schools across the country and serving thousands of educators.