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uk.businessinsider.com

21-year old AI prodigy wants to

revolutionize the education industry
Tom Turula, Business Insider Nordic
7-8 minutes

Joel Hellermark, 21, ignored university in order to change education

for good. Sana Labs

Sana Labs is an edtech startup founded by 21-year old Joel

Hellermark.

It provides AI platform that individualizes a student's learning

in subjects ranging from language to maths.

Applying AI to education has so far proved difficult, and Sana

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Labs hopes its scalable platform will change that.

Even Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have shown interest

towards the Swedish startup, which uses AlphaGo-type
technology to boost student performance.

Stockholm is home to many world-conquering startups.

But even in a city that spawned Spotify and King, Sana Labs stands
out for its sheer ambition. Last autumn, the startup launched a
platform for personalized learning and, so far, its biggest challenge
has been to scale up fast enough to meet soaring demand.

Founded by a 21-year old Swedish AI expert, Joel Hellermark,

Sana Labs wants to insert the latest advances in AI into education.
"We want any education company in the world to be able to
implement adaptivity in just a few days," says the founder and
CEO.

When all learning becomes adaptive, students will be learning twice

as fast, and you will be able to take all students to entirely new
heights of knowledge.

Once it's plugged into an existing digital education tool, Sana Labs
helps students learn faster and become more interested in the
content based on their individual learning behaviour.

Hellermark thinks his platform's scalability across domains could be

a game-changer for the $6 trillion global education industry (some
$120 billion is digitized). "When all learning becomes adaptive,
students will be learning twice as fast, and you will be able to take
all students to entirely new heights of knowledge."

When first founding Sana Labs in 2016, Hellermark spotted a huge

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untapped opportunity to commercialize cutting-edge AI in digital

education. The existing offering was based on rather primitive,
rules-based AI.

"Traditional education platforms have so far been based on pre-

determined rules that a computer acts on, much like when IBM's
Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov by mimicking the moves of the
world's best chess players," says Hellermark, whose early interest
in AI was sparked by Stanford professor Andrew Ng's machine
learning courses on Coursera.

AlphaGo's win in 2016 against the world champion of Go – a game

infinitely more complex than chess — underscored to Hellermark
the potential of deep neural networks, a strand of machine learning
that Sana Labs relies on. "AlphaGo showed how, using machine
learning, it continuously learned what leads to success by analyzing
historical data."

Sana Labs' AI learns from everything the student does in real time, and
determines his or her optimal learning pattern. Sana Labs

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The more data that's gathered on a student, the better Sana Labs is
able to predict and boost performance. "The really revolutionary
part," Hellermark says, "is how it analyzes and spots patterns that
no human could know existed."

A testament to Sana Labs' deep learning approach was its recent

win in Duolingo's Global AI competition: Sana Labs beat traditional
AI platforms in predicting future mistakes that learners of English,
Spanish, and French would make based on the mistakes they had
made in the past.

Identifying these sorts of learning gaps is what then enables Sana

Labs to tailor the right sort of content for each student – bye bye,
standardized 20th-century education.

"We are expecting improvements in orders of magnitude,"

Hellermark says. "Based on studies, students should be able to
work through the exact same content in half the time, or be 25 to 30
percent more engaged."

Having developed the algorithms that would underpin Sana Labs

technology, Hellermark looked for input from the best scientists in
the field including experts at NASA and Cornell University. Some
are now advisors to the company.

For commercial leads, the 21-year old went straight to the source
and shot his email pitch to Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook.

Both replied.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook took a keen interest in Sana Labs. Getty

"One of Apple's core values is education, so Tim Cook was curious

about potentially working together, as was Mark Zuckerberg," says
Hellermark, just back from meeting with Apple and Facebook in
California, as a result of those emails.

What should interest tech titans is that only some 2 percent of all
learning today is digital. The room for growth is massive, and
Google Classroom's rapid expansion bodes well for Sana Labs,
which aims to open its first overseas office in the US.

By the end of the year, we're hoping to have implemented Sana

Labs in products with hundreds of millions of users

Sana Labs works with two types of customers: publishing houses

and digital education platforms. After having focused on language
education early on, the company's AI platform is now all but content

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agnostic, able to work with courses ranging from math to

programming to medical prep tests.

Neil Jacobstein, Chair of AI & Robotics at Singularity University,

thinks that AI tutors or platforms are going to change education for
good. But he doesn't buy that there could be just one single engine
– a Netflix if you will – for personalized education, which is what
Sana Labs wants to become.

It gets too complicated, according to the AI visionary.

"Building an AI tutor that tutors everything is like trying to boil the

ocean. For now, it makes more sense to focus on specialized
areas, and to do it really well, and later make a meta-AI that can
collect these course tutors," Jacobstein tells BI Nordic. "If [Sana
Labs] can do it, wonderful." (Sana Labs is not an AI tutor but an
intelligent AI layer applicable through a universal API, the company
says.)

If Hellermark gets to decide, Sana Labs will do to education what

his countryman Daniel Ek did to music with Spotify.

Bolstered by seed funding from business angels including Spotify's

former CMO, Atomico investor Sophia Bendz, the startup has been
poaching some of Stockholm's brightest tech minds on its team –
including engineers who built Spotify's playlist recommendations
engine.

Not a bad start then, for Joel Hellermark: "By the end of the year,
we're hoping to have implemented Sana Labs in products with
hundreds of millions of users," he says.

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