When it comes to educating the young, one of the challenges is in finding the right format that can continually sustain their focus and motivation to keep on learning. If the curriculum is too difficult, they will quickly become overwhelmed and lag behind as a result. On the other hand, if the curriculum is too easy they will become bored and drop out. Other challenges include reaching out to the underprivileged and those who lack access to proper education. Joni.AI, a Singapore-based edtech startup that provides a mobile-first, interactive learning platform powered by artificial intelligence (AI), seeks to address these challenges and bring quality, personalized education to a wider audience regardless of circumstance.
Founded in 2017 initially by a group of university students as a community project to nurture underprivileged students in mastering mathematics, the edtech startup has steadily grown into the premium, highly adaptive AI-powered learning solution that it is today. Its proprietary AI, affectionately nicknamed Joni, is designed specifically to generate personalized questions and remediation for students, based on a curriculum that has been extensively vetted by experienced ministry of education-trained professionals and educators. Essentially, what Joni does is that it will generate personalized questions and remediation for students on-demand based on its comprehensive analysis of thousands of individual and group data points. This enables the AI to generate questions that are just right for the student’s learning capability and capacity at that moment in time without being too difficult or too easy, thus sustaining the student’s interest and motivation to keep learning. Additionally, Joni is developed in such a way that it maximises cognitive memory retention for its students whenever it generates personalized questions.
Another special feature was that Joni was developed with a focus on education psychology in mind as the startup believes that a student’s emotions can play a major role in determining education personalization on their app. Therefore the AI-powered Joni factors in a student’s emotional well-being as well in order to deliver a more effective and engaging personalized learning experience. With this focus on each individual student’s needs, Joni.AI seeks to build an educational ecosystem whereby each and every student is able to learn productively according to their own individual pacing and needs.
Joni.AI had been selected by Accelerating Asia, a Singapore-headquartered regional network of startup programs and an early-stage venture capital fund, to be part of its January 2020 second cohort of 10 high growth regional startups, which consist of enterprising startups hailing from the countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and Australia. As a participant of the accelerator program, Joni.AI will receive US$74,000 from Accelerating Asia’s venture arm as growth funding. Amra Naidoo, Accelerating Asia’s co-founder, had high praise for Joni.AI, saying that the AI-enabled edtech startup certainly has the means and potential to be the region’s spark in igniting a sea change in the regional education ecosystem through its highly personalized education platform powered by AI-enabled adaptive learning technology, which provides students a customized educational experience that respects their needs and allows them to learn at their own pace.
Built on the premise that quality education should be accessible to all students regardless of social standing or background circumstances, and that highly engaging educational experiences inspire students to achieve their fullest potential, the edtech startup Joni.AI is inevitably changing and transforming how education is being taught to young students. As its acceptance into Accelerating Asia’s second cohort demonstrates, it is poised to disrupt the education space and become a major catalyst for positive impact and change.
