A startup looking to revolutionise teacher workloads with its AI-powered marking and feedback tool has raised £500,000 in funding.
The investment into London-based stylus was made by Sure Valley Ventures.
The firm’s AI-marked, human-moderated feedback solution, LearnCycle, removes whole swathes of out-of-hours work associated with marking the assessments that students complete on paper. In doing so it aims to help schools to retain teachers while maintaining high standards of feedback.
It uses a combination of narrowly focused and broad-scope AI strategies to mark and analyse paper-based assessments at scale. These papers can be administered for entire year groups or individual pupils. Once completed, teachers scan the papers in bulk, which are then processed through AI-driven marking and accuracy optimisation, with freelance teacher markers moderating the work to ensure the quality of the feedback remains high.
The results are used to generate personalised student reports, providing immediate and actionable feedback. Teachers can review and moderate digitised versions of their students’ work, with strengths and areas for improvement highlighted to inform future lessons.
The company was founded by Dominic Bristow, a data-loving physics teacher who left the classroom 10 years ago to pursue a better solution than countless hours holding a red pen. Since then, he has worked across various roles within EdTech, including educational data analysis, school improvement and product innovation, before founding stylus late last year.
The startup has seen positive early traction, working with early adopters including large multi-academy trusts of both secondary and primary schools across the UK, and attracting a growing waitlist.
“In my experience, education leaders remain sceptical that strong staff retention and wellbeing in schools can coexist with high standards of marking and feedback,” said Bristow.
“Through our work at stylus we intend to prove this a false dichotomy. I have been working on this problem space since I reluctantly left the classroom for a life without marking 10 years ago, but it’s taken until this point for a solution to be truly viable.
“Although I made some headway in the past with products that amplified the effort teachers spent marking, what we really lacked was a way of making decisions about students’ work on behalf of their teachers.
“In a world of AI technologies we can finally ‘take the work out of the paperwork’ for schools that outsource their exam marking to us, in conjunction with teacher-moderation to ensure the highest quality output. At the same time we can provide students with exciting new educational opportunities via the unprecedented level of detail in our marking output, and the sheer volume of marking we can handle for schools.
“We have been delighted by the positive reaction of our early adopters, and we’re thrilled to bring Sure Valley Ventures onboard, who are fully aligned with our long-term vision.”
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