Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Brisk Teaching Secures $6.9M to Bring AI-Powered Tools to Teachers and Students - Featuring CEO Arman Jaffer and Owl Ventures’ Emily Bennett
Arman Jaffer is the founder and CEO of Brisk Teaching. Brisk is an AI tool that helps educators personalize their instruction and save hours of time on administrative tasks.
Emily Bennett currently serves as a Principal investor at Owl Ventures.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Brisk Teaching’s AI tools streamline teacher workflows and enhance instructional efficiency.
- The vision for AI in edtech, focusing on student-centered, adaptive learning through tools like Brisk Boost.
- Key insights into Owl Ventures’ investment strategy in AI-focused edtech solutions.
- The critical factors for edtech startups navigating the current funding landscape.
- The future of student-facing AI in education and its impact on teaching and learning.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:00:22] How AI enhances insights into student thinking for improved instruction.
[00:01:49] Brisk Teaching's AI tools streamline teacher workflows with automation.
[00:05:09] Owl Ventures' perspective on investing in high-impact AI edtech.
[00:07:20] Brisk’s integration into teachers’ daily workflows across platforms.
[00:13:03] The shift toward student-focused AI for personalized learning.
[00:20:35] Use case for Brisk Boost’s interactive student tutoring aligned with learning objectives.
[00:30:26] Practical advice for edtech entrepreneurs on navigating the funding landscape.
✨ EdTech Insiders+ Members' Exclusive:
Don’t miss the overtime episode with Arman & Emily, where they go beyond the main conversation to discuss:
- Advice for founders on building impactful edtech products
- Sustainable business models for AI in education
- Essentials for creating responsible, student-focused AI
Subscribe to EdTech Insiders+ to access this exclusive content, get first dibs on event announcements, tickets and more!
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🎉 Presenting Sponsor:
This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 25 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
[00:00:22] Arman Jaffer: AI creates this new opportunity for observability into that process of thinking for students, which actually is the most relevant thing if you think about good instruction. It's not about the essay that a sixth grader is writing, because to be honest, at least sixth grader me was not an amazing writer, but it's more about that process to get to that product.
And so we think that AI presents this opportunity to give, you know, a writing coach to students. So as they're working, you even can understand the concepts that they're struggling with. And I think that type of nuance and information is not even just helpful at that individual student level, but that summarization of it at a class wide level can give teachers additional information on what next steps look like.
For that class, which I think is really important.
[00:01:10] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to ed tech insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry funding rounds to impact AI developments across early childhood, K 12, higher ed and work. You'll find it all
[00:01:24] Ben Kornell: here at ed tech insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar and to go deeper, check out ed tech insiders plus where you can get premium content.
Access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
[00:01:49] Alex Sarlin: Today we're speaking to Armand Jaffer, founder and CEO of Brisk Teaching and Emily Bennett, Principal Investor at Owl Ventures, which led Brisk Teaching's recent 6. 9 million seed round. Brisk is an AI tool that helps educators personalize their instruction and save hours of time on administrative tasks.
The Chrome extension is directly integrated within educators existing tools and supports changing the reading level of texts, content creation, feedback on student work, And the deployment of lesson aligned AI tutors to students. One year after launching, Brisk is used by one in ten teachers in the United States.
Prior to founding Brisk, Armand worked in the office of the CTO at the White House and led an education team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Emily Bennett currently serves as the principal investor at Owl Ventures. Previously, Emily served as product marketing manager for News Integrity at Facebook, implementing products and scaled initiatives to help curb misinformation on the platform.
She was a product manager for video at the New York Times and worked on growth product strategy at Spotify. Emily graduated from Middlebury College and received her MBA from Harvard Business School. Arman Jaffer and Emily Bennett. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. I'm so excited to be back on the pod.
[00:03:13] Emily Bennett: Great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
[00:03:14] Alex Sarlin: This is such a cool conversation. So, you know, Arman, brisk teaching has been really one of the most standout success stories in the AI space, especially for teachers. And you just announced recently a 6. 9 million funding round. That is Fantastic, especially at this moment where funding can be hard to come by, but you're doing amazing work.
Let me start with you. Tell us about what Brisk does for people who don't know about it yet and what impact the funding is going to have on your trajectory. What do you want to do next? And what are you doing next?
[00:03:47] Arman Jaffer: Yeah, so Brisk is an AI powered Chrome extension that helps teachers use AI in the tools they're already using so that they can do things like providing first pass feedback on student work, creating lesson plans, quizzes, and slides directly in the formats they're already used to using.
And now, Also being able to take any content they're looking at and create a AI chatbot for their students with it. And so, yeah, we're really excited to leverage a lot of the funds that Owl and so many of our amazing investors have provided to be able to really double down on this student facing component.
And extend our engineering team. Alex, you actually know two of the founding engineers, Hedger and Tom. And so we've been able to reach, you know, over 500, 000 teachers just with two engineers. And so we're really excited to increase the size of the engineering team to really be able to reach new heights.
Yeah.
[00:04:38] Alex Sarlin: And those are two engineers, but they're equivalent of at least five people each. They're unbelievably good engineers. Emily, you know, Owl Ventures, one of the absolute biggest, most influential EdTech venture firms in the world. No question about it. You're the lead investor on this 6. 9 million round.
Tell us a little bit about, from your perspective, what was it about Brisk's product and their team that got you really excited to invest, especially in this particular moment and in this particular competitive space?
[00:05:09] Emily Bennett: I think it's challenging because we, along many others are being pitched a myriad of edtech AI solutions, ranging from everything from teacher tools to tutoring, to assessment, content creation, all the way into workforce.
And so it really runs the gamut of use cases. And I think it's easy when you're pitched so many quote lookalike players to. Get mixed in kind of the ecosystem of novelty versus the real focus on utility. So what we were looking for as a firm, and I mean, specifically, what's a combination of tools that we're solving a real impertinent problem in the space and as specialist investors, that's something that we're able to really narrow down on as well as teams that were best equipped and built to tackle these problems spaces in the most scalable way possible.
So brisk bought a combination of both starting with the problem space, there's problem of teacher inefficiency and lack of personalized adaptive instruction. Amidst an ongoing teaching staffing crisis, which was exacerbated by COVID, but sustains. And so the ability to really just better equip the classroom and to better steer both training on the teacher side as well as delivery of AI for student outcomes is exactly what we're looking for.
And then on the team side, we're looking for teams typically at early stage with a mix of both vocationals and more educational as well as technical expertise. And that's what really was unlocked here. It was a combination of both CZI backgrounds, really understanding the space, understanding schools, the nuances of selling there and the real demands of the classroom, as well as, uh, Big engineering component that came from meta and just that experience building, building quickly and building good technology.
And that flew into product, which is someone that I formerly was a product manager and spent a lot of time in the product space. So I always demo the products that we do invest in. And we talk to end users to get a sense of like, how does this resonate? I think something that felt different about brisk is that there's a product that felt intuitive and neatly built into the flow of work versus cluttered.
So really like aiming to reinforce existing infrastructure versus reinforcing new tooling, which we know is just a really hard curb to get across in the education ecosystem. So those, those are a myriad of reasons among others. And also just of course, loving Armand and building the relationship there.
[00:07:20] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's a really thorough answer. I love that. There are lots of different reasons, but yeah, it's a competitive space, but I'm sure you get pitched so many lookalike ideas, so many things that seem similar and especially, you know, Yeah. Those of us in the ed tech space have seen the generative AI sort of curve.
And the first suite of companies that we followed, at least, were really, really focused purely, purely on the educator side, which is, makes total sense. Educators need lots of help. They are, have so much. Agency in the classroom and the A. I can work with them directly without having to worry about some of the student side issues, including data privacy or bias or all those things.
But even within that space, because there are a number of tools for the teachers in this space. Brisk does some things that are really unique. And one of the things I'd like to ask you about our mind, I think springboarding off of what Emily was just saying. The flow of work. I mean, this is something I find really compelling and interesting about Brisk.
You have built a product that you mentioned it as a Chrome extension. Give us a little bit more of a sense of it because I think that you have done a really interesting job of making Brisk. I mean, I'm looking at it right now. I literally have the Brisk logo on my screen right now because it's sitting there in the corner of my Google Doc.
Tell us about what you've done to make sure that Brisk is truly incorporated into educators everyday workflow.
[00:08:38] Arman Jaffer: Yeah, that's a great question. And so I guess taking a step back, the thing that I hate the most in EdTech is actually the architecture of the EdTech stack, right? I think the way technology has been thrown into the classroom, it started in the 80s with SIS systems.
And since then, we've accumulated all of this almost technical debt of how teachers kind of need to navigate in the classroom. And so when you actually look at the workflows of teachers. You're looking at a bunch of tabs. If you look at a teacher's browser, there will just be 50 or 60 tabs. It honestly gives me anxiety.
And so When we think about the workflows of teachers, we see it cross cutting all of these existing legacy categories, right? If you actually designed the classroom technology starting from scratch right now, it would look completely different, right? The distinction between SIS and LMS doesn't make any sense.
And so, for us, really, what we do is we try to follow the teacher and replicate that nuance and interconnectedness. That good instruction looks like, right? So when you're grading papers, you're not just thinking about providing a score, but you're also thinking about what does differentiation look like at that next step?
How do I group my students? How do I create a reteach lesson plan for students who may not have grasped that context? And the only way you can kind of replicate that nuance is by actually following the teacher around and being able to show up in places where their workflows are. And so as a result, we built a Chrome extension as a starting point, right?
To be able to navigate that context, but that's not completely the entire vision for brisk. Ultimately, we think that this concept of this legacy ed tech stack, which is 150 tools that the average teacher uses in a given school year will not exist in the future of AI. And it will actually be. Probably much simpler and much more coherent.
And so for us, a Chrome extension was the first way to start to get from point A to point B, where that point B is really a compound startup that is able to bring in the context and the workflows that currently crosscut all these legacy categories.
[00:10:39] Alex Sarlin: Just double click a little bit on where in the workflow you live.
Cause for people who haven't used the product, I think it may be surprising. It literally just sort of weaves right into mostly the Google suite experience. So what tools does it integrate with within Google?
[00:10:55] Arman Jaffer: Yeah. So we were not just a Google focused tool. We do a lot more. We integrate with a ton of tools, including learning management systems, such as Canvas and Schoology.
And our roadmap is really about how do we live within all the different tools that teachers are using. So that includes PDFs and online textbooks, but yes, Brisk also integrates with Google. So we integrate with YouTube, slides, docs, forms, in addition to a couple of other tools as well. And so to your question about how does it sit within the teacher's workflow.
What we really think about, especially in this world of AI co pilots, is behavior change because educators aren't necessarily grasping for another, like for AI when they could leverage AI. And so we think about intention, being able to intercept that intention of doing that more rote process and being able to offer and scaffold ways in which you can improve efficiency and improve the impact of teaching.
And so for us, that means when you're actually starting to draft a feedback comment, we In student work, we actually provide a suggestion and say, Hey, this is what AI drafted. Is this something that you're looking for? And so we're looking at patterns that really are able to start to move the needle to be able to incorporate AI in a way that doesn't require a kind of new behavior change or intention.
[00:12:08] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I didn't realize you integrated into canvas and so many other tools as well. But yeah, it makes sense. You're sort of, there's multiple steps of the teaching process and brisk is sort of there alongside, even as teachers go from tool to tool, or if they're working within an existing, you know, major suite between Google and canvas, that's two thirds of the LMS market for K 12 already, you know, brisk is sort of there alongside the whole time.
So, yeah. Emily, I wanted to ask you about this sort of teacher to student jump, but you know, Arman mentioned the brisk boost feature, which allows teachers to create chatbots for students. So basically allows students to get direct hands on experience with generative AI tools. That has been something that people have really been wrestling with, you know, when to do that, how to do it safely, how to do it in a way that's comfortable for everyone involved.
As somebody who sees this space from a, you know, 50, 000 foot view, do you feel like we're starting to make that jump from the teacher side to the student side?
[00:13:03] Emily Bennett: 100%. I think often with new technology, there's an initial wave of reticence, and partly because technology is new and because there are needs for kind of better regulatory measures as we roll out new technology, especially around AI.
But I think what attracts us here is that if you are able to kind of train I and use cases in the lens of education, specifically, then you can really harness it for good and for student outcomes. And what does that mean? In this form? It's the ability for every student to really have a learning agent.
That is entirely custom to them. And that's really never existed before. We're moving from a model where a lot of students. It's like a 1 to 30 teacher ratio or worse, especially in developing markets. And what you get there is a really flat, non iterative learning experience. And so like, what's the major unlock of AI that we see in a classroom is the ability for every student to progress at their own pace, to progress in a way that fills their own time.
Competency gaps and actually leads to like much better adaptive and catered learning outcomes. And that's what I think brisk as well enabled to be able to unlock with this type of solution.
[00:14:08] Alex Sarlin: That adaptive learning outcomes, as well as the concept of student engagement, being able to work directly with students rather than in a 30 to one ratio.
in a much more one to one ratio, but still having the educator central to the experience, which I think is key to what you're doing, Arman. It feels like a really big leap. So let me hear it from you as well. You mentioned Brisk Boost in passing, but can you give us the sort of day in the life of a Brisk Boost user?
Like what is the flow of a teacher creating one bot? What kind of thing would they do it on and what would the students be using it for? And then how does it get to that sort of adaptive catered learning outcomes that Emily just mentioned, as well as student engagement?
[00:14:48] Arman Jaffer: Yeah, that's a great question.
I'll also just respond to kind of your question to Emily, which is that, you know, for us, the way we decide on what to build is really focused on two things. One is like our ultimate vision of rewriting the EdTech SAC to be AI native. But in the short term, it's really about the needs that educators are articulating to us.
And so it's been really interesting to see this shift. First, you know, when we launched in March of 2023, the only thing educators were talking about where students using AI to cheat, that was top of mind for educators. And then we saw over the course of last academic year, the shift towards teacher co pilots being able to improve the efficiency of teacher workflows.
And so Brisk obviously built a lot of tools that were really, you know, tailored to that need. And as we've stayed in touch with all of our educators and community, we've heard this latent desire that started to get louder and louder to really think about how they could incorporate AI directly in instruction with students.
And, you know, educators are really saying, you know, our students are graduating and they'll need to learn how to use AI. I want to prepare them with 21st century skills and student facing AI as a component of that. And so often we find that students who are from low income, low socioeconomic class backgrounds do not have access to these tools.
And I think that's actually why it's incredibly important that we focus on student, student facing AI at this point, rather than saying that this is something that, you know, they'll learn outside of school because we know often that privileged communities are those ones that are most often, unfortunately.
empowered with technology earlier. And so I think it's really important for us to really focus on this problem. But your question around basically what the boost activity workflow looks like, our thesis with brisk boost is not to build something that is completely new, like build an AI tool, but really to incorporate AI directly into the workflows that teachers are already engaged in with students.
So, As a teacher, I'm already going to assign a student some content to read or an activity or a quiz. And rather than thinking about, you know, AI as the separate thing, how do we think about AI for a check for understanding? So with Brisk, it's a Chrome extension, so you take a PDF that you're looking at, or you take a Google slide presentation you're going through with your students, and you can boost it, which means that you can add an AI tutor or an assessment that goes with it.
The students completing that assessment, it's optional for the student to be able to also see that resource on the left hand side, but to be able to completely engage in that process. And now the teacher isn't just providing an AI experience for their student, but also seeing their students kind of drive progress through learning objectives.
Which is actually tailored to brisk and something super unique that we find educators really love about it. It's not about this undirected AI tutor experience. It's actually trying to drive students towards this concept of completion where they've been able to demonstrate certain skills and understanding to be able to say that, okay, we've completed this assignment.
And so we've found that educators are doing this to assess students, understanding to engage them, to really give them feedback on student work before they submit. Often we find that students are waiting weeks to be able to get feedback on their writing, and at that point the impact of that instruction is completely nullified.
And so we think that student facing AI can provide that first Pass feedback opportunities. So then when a student has feedback can revise and then submit their assignment They'll be able to engage in productive struggle and continue to kind of develop learning process
[00:18:19] Emily Bennett: I think that the question you'd asked about what interested us in risk There's two components that I'm gonna spread up one is just like the real synergies between teacher and student facing AI And can you start to provide both data and also connection points between process in a way that creates a more circuitous loop?
And the second is Arvind's reference around cheating. We get pitched a lot of solutions, which are just show me the answer, but here's the reality. Students are going to like those solutions. They're going to get a lot of traction, but it's not a tool that we would invest in based on our alignment with outcomes and how important that is to us as a firm and how important also that is to students.
So just focus on kind of. process iteration, really reinforcing the different components of learning versus that direct path to an answer. In any school, if you're going to be selling into districts, if you're going to be selling into individual schools, it's absolutely critical to unlocking sustainable revenue and long term value.
[00:19:10] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic point. I mean, I internally call those apps, you know, scan and solve apps. It's like something homework, they call them homework helpers, but basically you take a picture of your homework and it gives you the answer. And like you said, very student friendly, like catnip for certain types of students, at least, but not at all conducive to the true educational outcomes that we're all looking for.
So. Let me just put a little color on this because this is what I'm envisioning when I hear both of you describe this circuitous loop and how brisk boost works. And tell me if this is a proper use case or if I'm getting it wrong. You know, the teacher is teaching, let's say it's a short story. It's a Hemingway short story.
And so the student, what they're doing at home is reading the story and then, you know, starting to understand certain things about it based on the standards. Maybe they're looking for metaphors, maybe they're looking for characterization or understanding what the inferences are, what the author is trying to say.
Well, the AI bot that is created next to this tool that's sitting next to that Hemingway short story, you know, optionally would sort of provide assessments and questions and work with a student on a one on one basis, but all targeted towards exactly those learning goals. So it would say, Hey, do you notice any metaphors in this story?
Let's talk about it. But it would be able to do it in a very conversational, friendly way. But it wouldn't be just an open box, like a search box where a student can say, can you tell me about the metaphors in the story? And it says here are three metaphors. It's much more of a tailored actual learning experience.
Is that about right?
[00:20:35] Arman Jaffer: Absolutely. So we try to replicate what good instruction looks like, right? So good instruction is probing questions to be able to have that student be able to engage in their own self reflection on the answer rather than pointing them towards the right answer. And so to your earlier question, I think, There's this question about AI, kind of the product of work becoming irrelevant, basically students being able to cheat.
And so I think there's been a lot of concern. And I think AI has this double edged sword where yes, maybe the product might become commodified at the end, but the process itself is something that AI creates this new opportunity for observability into that process of thinking for students, which actually is the most relevant thing.
If you think about good instruction, it's not about. The essay that a sixth grader is writing, because to be honest, at least sixth grader me was not an amazing writer, but it's more about that process to get to that product. And so we think that AI presents this opportunity to give, you know, a writing coach to students.
So as they're working, you even can understand the concepts that they're struggling with. And I think that type of. nuance and information is not even just helpful at that individual student level, but that summarization of it at a class wide level can give teachers additional information on what next steps look like for that class, which I think is really important.
So bringing it back to that Hemingway example, you know, some students might be struggling to understand specific types of metaphors as part of this assignment, and being able to see how that ladders up to my class and then how I kind of take a next step as a result of that or do a small group instruction with students who are all misunderstanding a specific metaphor in that piece I think is like really the truly the opportunity for AI here.
[00:22:19] Emily Bennett: It's a combination between I mean you reference more content level training where it's it's able to kind of probe based on the specific curriculum that it's tethered to but eventually it's like students are coming from different levels one student struggling with similes one student stuff like with metaphors can you actually like Tailor an AI to be able to suit those individual competencies and gaps and then layer that information back to the teacher for more contextual congruence.
And that's the circuitous loop that I see from content to adaptive personalization.
[00:22:45] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's also, as you both mentioned, really interesting because it definitely keeps, not only keeps the educator, it sort of empowers the educator as the central hub of the experience. The educator is Doing the assignment in the first place from both sides, they're providing the assignment.
They're going to be the one, you know, giving feedback on it ultimately, but they're also training the bot, not training in a super technical way, but they're telling the bot what the learning objectives are. They're understanding what kind of activity would be AI enhanced and adding it to that. So it really, it's a really natural extension of what Brisk is already doing, which is empowering educators in all these other ways to say, why not be able to create something that is interactive with a student rather than A lesson plan or feedback or some of the things that it's done in the past or slides.
It's really exciting. So let's zoom out a little bit. There's a question for both of you, but I want to start with you, Emily, because you are so deep in this. You know, we are in such a wild moment in the ed tech world. We talk with many of our guests on this show about it. It's, you know, simultaneously some of the smallest amounts of investment from venture that we've seen in 10 years.
And at the same time, Everybody is incredibly excited. Me, maybe as much as anybody, if not more, about this possibility of AI just changing the landscape, making things totally different in terms of how we teach and learn. I think it's really amazing. So you're seeing these sort of things that pull in different directions.
What does it look like as an investor right now? How do you navigate these two poles that are each having major influence? You also have the loss of ESSER funding on the sort of negative side, you know, how do you navigate these two poles and really make sure that the investment landscape stays robust and that the ed tech space stays healthy?
We'll be right back. This season of EdTech Insiders is again proudly sponsored by our M& A partners, Tuck Advisors. Thinking of selling your company? As experts in mergers and acquisitions in education and EdTech, Tuck Advisors. Can help at tuck advisors. Their motto is make hay while the sun shines. If you want to start planning the harvest contact tuck advisors now
[00:24:59] Emily Bennett: Yeah, and I think we're already starting to see I mean there's been a slowdown in overall venture dollars But in terms of just outpouring into ai both on infrastructure and i'd say increasingly on application layer solutions Like it's starting to really show incremental growth, which is just Evidence of like early investor conviction that there's going to be a new wave of technology and teams that can really break the code on AI first.
We're thinking about it in two ways. And for context, we have over 80 global portfolio companies of variable scale. We invest in everything from seed through series C typically at the entry point, but really through growth and exit. And so there's kind of two layers of engagement that we simultaneously are trying to take on the portfolio side.
One is thinking about like, what is the role of incumbents and larger players? How do they stay competitive? And how do you use AI in two ways? I think the natural way is everyone thinks external first, because it's the most apparent and obvious. But really some of like the most useful use cases that we've seen to date have been internal.
It's been, how do we streamline efficiencies? How do we do more with less? How do we really manage and reduce costs, especially in an ecosystem in which growth venture dollars have been slowed down and so sustained runway and greater efficiencies and better gross margin profile, all of these things distinctly matter to late stage players.
So we spent a lot of time there. And then it's been looking through that ecosystem and discerning like, where are there remaining gaps where we see. Real space for disruption. And so I think in the K 12 stack, back to brisk, like there's great examples of that. There's a lot of really outdated solutions that are very slow to innovate and that really aren't well equipped to be AI native in this space.
And so what do we look for? And I think actually like some teams have fumbled this and some teams have gotten entirely right, where there was like an early wave of everyone pitching. AI is the form of innovation. At the end of the day, schools and teachers, students too, they don't care about AI. They care about the problem they're trying to solve, and AI is the path to the answer and the path to get them there.
And so what we're looking for is, like, what's the clarity and acuity of the problem that this platform is trying to solve? Do we think that problem is scalable enough? And do we think that other players are? Less well equipped to solve it based on the inherent space for AI to drive greater innovation and efficiency.
We're then looking for like early validation on product and go to market with brisk. A couple of things that we saw that were really exciting. One, we talked already about the quality of the technical team. Second was. Just early validation from teachers and from schools. It's the question of, like, if you sit down at a district or at a school and you're talking to a buyer, how do they respond?
And also, even more importantly, in ways, if this is in the hands of a teacher, how do they respond? And how do they actually leverage this and drive engagement within their classroom? And so the metrics that we saw there, In terms of both like engagement, both qualitative and quantitative were highly compelling as just early validation of that.
And then the third is business model. And that's actually hard in this space, especially because everyone knows there's underlying costs for compute and they're going down, but we haven't pitched a lot of solutions where there's inherent inefficiencies that just make it really hard for businesses to scale.
And so that come of that comes back to. What's the value that you build around AI that enables you to have more leverage on price point? And some of it comes back to do we have an inherently technical team that understands how to work with AI? I don't mean you have to go out and hire 10 infrastructure AI people from open AI that are all going to be a million dollars.
I'm exaggerating by a small margin, but it does mean that you need to have people that understand how to work with this technology, how to train efficiently and how to reduce redundancies, which leads to just better cost process and better business module efficiency. So all of those things wrapped together are kind of what we're looking for, which is like problem space team ability to kind of manipulate technology.
And again, that like composite value that you build on the application layer, which goes back to this being just like a platform that the end user can't live without. And those are the products that actually work.
[00:29:00] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it solves a real problem. I love the way you put that, that you know, nobody's looking for AI for its own sake.
Some people are sort of have a job where they're the head of AI innovation and they have to think about AI, but even so they're looking to solve meaningful problems in the classroom of which we know there are many, many. And, um, I love that you speak to end users as sort of part of the core process at Owl.
You really go to the customers and, you know, demo and show and ask them, and you mentioned qualitative and quantitative feedback. They're using it. They're using it frequently. They're using it. They're retaining and coming back, and they're really loving it. They really enjoy using the system or whatever tool you're evaluating.
In this case, it's Brisk. And Arman, let's talk about it from the other side. You've been fundraising over the last year in a environment. That has these polar poles in either direction where there's less money for growth, as Emily just mentioned, but incredible excitement about AI. And I would say that of the 500, at least, you know, in not even including all the apps, AI native, as you say, products that have been spawned in the last two years, I would personally put brisk at the very top tier in terms of growth, you know, maybe another.
Eight to 10 companies that if I were to name my sort of fastest growing, most impactful AI companies, brisk would definitely be on that list. So I think you have an advantage in that way. You've done a lot of things, right? But even so it must be a tricky fundraising environment. What's it been like talking to a number of different investors over the last year about risk future?
[00:30:26] Arman Jaffer: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think over the last year and a half, there's been a lot of changes and a lot of learning from investors and from entrepreneurs, right? I think You know, if I think back to January, 2023, I think there was a lot of warranted skepticism from investors on AI. Like just basic questions about, you know, our thin wrappers around chat GPT, really a product strategy.
How do you think about, you know, students being able to, or be teachers just using chat GPT, you know, there is a perception sometimes that teachers are not the first to adopt a new technology. And so there were a lot of questions, right? And I think as an entrepreneur, you need to take a bet on something.
That is potentially needs to be de risked, right? You often take venture money, not necessarily because you have all the answers, but you are taking that money to be able to de risk some of the bets that you need to make in order to have a successful venture, right? And so over that process, I'll just be very transparent.
We pitched Owl for our pre seed and they passed. And Emily was the one who provided that news to us. And so part of what you need to do as an entrepreneur is realize that, you know, often it's a constant learning process around what you need to be able to prove. And so for us, when we pitched Owl initially, we weren't charging any money.
And we also had like a hundred or 200 users, right? And so what we really needed to prove in the meantime, between June, 2023, and when we fundraised most recently is. Being able to prove that districts and schools were willing to purchase this new AI thing and also purchase a Chrome extension. I think there was also some skepticism around, you know, is a Chrome extension really like a full product?
And so being able to demonstrate the value that we were providing to districts and then. Charge for it, I think was really important to be able to demonstrate that, no, this isn't just a nice to have thing. This isn't just, you know, we shared it with a couple of educator friends we know, and they said, this looks good, but like, no, this is something that has its own legs and it's growing virally without us investing in any marketing.
And so. For us, it's this constant process where with the seed money, we are looking to de risk additional questions that we need to prove out before our Series A. And so, that's kind of how I think about it. With respect to ESSER and all of these other, you know, trends, I think. When you're starting a company, you are told all the reasons not to start that company.
No one makes money in ed tech. You know, ESSER funding is drying up. You know, X, Y, and Z. I think there are always reasons to start and not start a company with specific ideas, and you really just have to be clear about what needs to be true for you to win, right? And so for us, we believed, you know, I talked to one person who was just like, It would be the dumbest thing to start an ed tech company right now because extra funding is drying up and you really have to take that with a grain of salt and say like, okay, but there's this underlying technological shift that is going to force districts, despite the fact that they're cutting their budgets to say, Hey, we're going to take a bet on an AI tool and you really just need to be able to have that conviction and not necessarily listen to all the reasons why not to start a company.
You need to be aware of them, but you need to be able to put them aside to be able to found something.
[00:33:32] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a terrific advice for the aspiring and current entrepreneurs who are a little closer to the 200 users than the, you know, one in 10 teachers in the United States numbers that Brisk has reached already.
Now, how many users do you have on the platform as of October, 2024? 700, 000. So you've definitely proven out some real traction there. This has been a fascinating conversation. I wish we could speak more. We'll do a couple of questions in our overtime segment for our subscribers, but this has been such an amazing conversation.
And I love having both of you here to talk about both sides of this investment. It's really been a great conversation. This is Armand Jaffer, founder and CEO of Brisk Teaching and Emily Bennett, founder Principal investor at Owl Ventures, one of the absolute most impactful and largest EdTech funds in the world.
Thank you so much, both of you, for being here with us on EdTech Insiders. Thanks
[00:34:24] Emily Bennett: for
[00:34:25] Alex Sarlin: listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more EdTech Insiders, Subscribe to the free EdTech Insiders newsletter on Substack.
