Project Read is Launched!

Project Read is live and in classrooms!? Here is what we’ve built and why.

When Vivek Ramakrishnan and I started Project Read 9 months ago, our thesis was that generative AI would be an amazing way to help motivate children to start reading early.? Our first iteration was a story creator that could make stories and illustrations.? The stories were very creative and fun.

Lots of people liked our story maker, but most parents didn’t care that much.? Some really wanted us to help their children with the mechanics of learning to read, so we started to think about that.

Our next iteration was focused on helping children at home learn to read, with real-time feedback from our AI coach based on how the child had read the words on the page out loud.? It had much better uptake with parents.? But it had even better response from teachers.??

In interviews, we identified the subset of parents (upper demographic and immigrant mostly) who wanted our help.? But most parents thought that reading was a school’s responsibility.

At the same time, teacher interest in a generative AI product for reading was strong.? This was a bit of a challenge for us because my co-founder Viv and I have both run schools and know that edtech is pretty low on the priority list.

Historically, edtech companies selling to schools don’t make great venture businesses.? But teachers were very clear that this was a need for them, so our mission to help all children read won out, and we pivoted fully to schools.

In the process, we discovered Science of Reading (everything the National Reading Panel had discovered about good explicit instruction 20 years ago ) aligned instruction, which in recent years had taken hold again.?

The evidence on SoR is clear, but the lift on elementary teachers is heavy. They must explicitly teach phonics, track progress and common mistake patterns, provide sufficient opportunities for practice and the right intervention for each child. All for 30+ young students with unique needs.?

This created the opportunity to tailor our product to this new movement among teachers.? In just a few conversations, we arrived on essentially what Project Read is today.??

Project Read generates a decodable story (with words appropriate to a child’s current level of decoding) personalized to each student and then listens to them read and provides feedback and hints for decoding on par with the best human tutors.

We were lucky to pilot with several nationally recognized school systems this summer including One City Schools in Madison and Dream Charters in New York.? Through that process, we iterated the product every day, mostly around the core loop of recognizing student mistakes and providing useful feedback. If a child cannot read proficiently by the end of 3rd grade, there’s an 80% chance they will never catch up. Early literacy is the highest leverage problem we can tackle in education.

Our mission trumps our business interests at this point.? We have bootstrapped the business so far, with a grant from Stanford to Viv for the social impact of the product .? We hope to find other philanthropists willing to help out.

If you are excited about what we are doing, there are three things you can do right now:

1. Get signed up at www.projectread.ai , it will only take about two minutes.
2. Refer teacher friends to the product.
3. Please share this post with your network!

We are excited to launch Project Read!? Please DM me with any questions or thoughts.