Yvonne Soh, Co-Founder of Noodle Factory
This article was first published on September 1, 2022.
Noodle Factory leverages AI to automate the creation, preparation, and grading of exams and assessments. While human teachers only teach one way of solving a problem, Noodle Factory’s AI tutors claim to learn and develop different methods and remember new approaches that students may have. It creates a personalised learning experience that gives direct instruction and feedback to learners.
The Singaporean startup, founded in 2018 by Yvonne Soh and Jim Wagstaff, serves higher education, K-12 and corporate learning institutions in Australia, Asia and the UK. In August 2021, the startup raised US$500,000 in seed funding, supported by edutech accelerators EduSpaze and SuperCharger Ventures and a consortium of angels.
Soh believes that technology helps free up valuable time so that students and educators can spend more time on meaningful interactions instead of being replaced by machines.
At the AWS Public Sector Summit in October 2022, Soh said that the edutech platform would like to scale what educators do in order to give personalised attention to each student.
In this interview, Soh speaks about the prevalent problem of burnout in educators and the gap in the market as edutech solutions are typically student-focused.
Edited excerpts:
Tell us about your background and its relevance to your current line of work.
I’ve always been in tech since I started work (many years ago!), although I majored in philosophy in my past life at university. I’ve done various roles in different tech companies, but they primarily focused on product management, marketing and technical sales.
I enjoy working closely with customers to understand their needs and see how tech can help make things better.
Can you talk about the moment you came up with the idea for this business?
About 13 years ago, my Co-Founder and I got into education, specifically adult education. My area of focus was developing complementary learning technologies to make the learning ‘sticky’ for learners.
During that time, I realised that one of the most significant issues in education is that educators are overworked, and it isn’t easy to scale what they do. That is when we started exploring the use of AI to automate educator tasks and engage learners better.
One of the things we thought was that “wouldn’t it be nice if we could create an AI version of ourselves (educators) so we can engage our students more and be there whenever they need us?” And that is how Noodle Factory was born!
Is there any personal experience that influences the founding of Noodle Factory?
Having personally been in education, we met many fellow educators. We realised how dedicated educators were and that many were in the profession because they genuinely wanted to make an impact.
However, they are also often neglected when it comes to educator-focused technologies and solutions. And because there is so much that educators need to do, many are burnt out and leave the profession. We then wanted to create an educator-first solution, a solution created by educators for educators.
What is the one problem you aim to solve with Noodle Factory? Why is this significant to the market/audience you cater to?
Educator burnout. We strongly believe that good teachers make great students, and we need to empower and support teachers as much as we can.
Describe your offering. What makes it unique?
We are an AI-powered teaching assistant platform. What makes us unique is that we use AI practically, the way it was intended to assist humans, in this case, teachers.
We empower teachers with simple-to-use AI to provide personalised learning experiences for their students. They can do this at scale as repetitive tasks (like marking and tutoring) are automated.
Can you tell us about the product development process? What has been the most challenging part of developing your product? How did you overcome it?
We believe in working closely with our customers to refine our product further. One of our fundamental design principles is that the product must be so easy to use that it takes only a few minutes (just like making a cup of instant noodles!).
Also Read: The future of education is AI: Here’s how it will look
One of the most challenging parts of developing the product is the user experience. Often (and we are guilty of this ourselves), we get wrapped up in trying to develop many ‘cool’ features, but they are not usable if no one knows what to do with them.
So, it’s always important to test the user interface, talk to users, and get feedback. There will be bad feedback, which sometimes does hurt if I’m being honest, as the product is like my baby. However, it’s essential to remember that we are building a product for our customers, not ourselves!
What challenges did you have to overcome when starting Noodle Factory?
Edutech is not something that is ‘sexy’, and when we started the company in 2018 (before the pandemic), there was little focus on Edutech. Being a B2B business, we needed institutions to want to invest in Edutech, and that was also difficult.
Many schools were not that open to new technology, and school budget cycles tended to be quite slow. The pandemic brought more attention to the importance of Edutech, more importantly, how overworked teachers were.
Although it is a fairly long sales cycle, it is gratifying when your product/technology can make a positive impact.
Can you tell us about your funding history? What is your plan with the latest funding?
We were bootstrapping for about three years, and in August 2021, we closed our seed round of funding with different angel investors and accelerators.
Since closing our seed round, we have grown the company in terms of our learning success team and our user base more than three times in the last nine months. We currently are running pilots with 25 institutions across several countries. We do have plans to extend our funding round so that we can expand into new markets.
Do you have any tips for fundraising companies?
Don’t give up! It can be quite discouraging at times as you will face many rejections. It takes time to build relationships and find the right partner. Don’t just chase the money; look for a long-term partner to help you grow the business.
Also, with every meeting, even if you get rejected, listening to the feedback and absorbing as much learning as possible is essential. There’s always room for improvement.
Who are your key competitors? How are you setting yourself apart from them?
We don’t have a lot of direct competitors as this is a relatively new area. However, we have met with competitors like Google’s teaching assistant, IBM Watson, and Antares. One of the key ways we set ourselves apart is to focus on providing simple-to-use AI. We can onboard our customers in just a few days, which is something not a lot of competitors can say.
What was the most challenging time that the company had gone through? How did you handle it? What lessons did you learn from it?
It’s always hard (haha!). I think a difficult time was when we worked hard on a large opportunity and had the deal fall through. It was disappointing and scary as we depended on it for our livelihood! But we learnt to be agile, adapt, and quickly refocus to get back on track.
How did the pandemic impact your organisation?
We’d always had work from anywhere culture, so the lockdowns did not really affect how we worked as we were already used to it.
From a business standpoint, we found that there was more attention on the need for edutech, and even now, post-pandemic, there is a lot of focus on leveraging Edutech to improve education.
How do you envision the next five years for your company?
I think you will see Walter, the name of our platform, in many more schools, industries and countries across the globe, supporting multiple languages. We plan to expand our footprint and establish a presence in some of our key markets.
Also Read: Why GoImpact believes that education is the key to promoting ESG investment
We also see a lot of potential for partnerships with complementary solution providers. Being early in the market, we also hope to be a market leader and well-known AI teaching assistant platform in the next few years.
What important milestones have you made so far?
We are currently running pilots with several renowned educational institutions and have tripled our user base in less than a year. Also, we have successfully expanded into our target markets: the US, UK and Australia.
Tell us about your company culture. What would be the best reason to join your company?
I always say we are a small but strong team. One of the best reasons is that we only work on what we are passionate about. We have a very flexible company culture. All of us can work from anywhere and on our own time. We also have an unlimited leave policy. We trust each other and it’s worked out well so far.
Any person, incident or philosophy that inspires your company culture?
I would say that (again, eons ago!), when I worked in the corporate world, I would often get Monday blues. And it felt meaningless to me that I spent such a large percentage of my time doing something that I somehow dread.
I realised it wasn’t that I didn’t like the work but was conflicted as I needed to manage my personal life too. So that is one thing we always believe in, which is to give our employees the flexibility to manage their time so they can be fulfilled both personally and professionally.
What is the funniest thing a team member/investor/client ever said about your company? Do you have any memorable story or incident from your journey so far (in this organisation)?
As you can imagine, we are often mistaken for a literal factory that makes noodles (because of our company name). It’s often the first thing anyone asks us.
I remember the first few times I did a sales presentation and worked hard to deliver a good presentation. When someone raised their hand to ask a question, I was waiting anxiously to answer it, wondering if it would be a difficult question, and they asked: “Why are you called Noodle Factory?”
I’m used to that now. I often receive promotional emails providing me with market information about the pasta market.
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