Underdog Founders - Charlotte left Meta to build Jackett
How hard can it be to digitize teacher workflows and give teachers more time to focus on their students? Charlotte decided to find out.
Everybody loves to see underdogs win. It’s the sweetest victory of all.
Charlotte grew up in Thailand and was the 1st in her family to go to university.
The contrast between her public and private education was massive.
It was the difference between “be quiet, comply” and “go on, explore”.
Seeing this, her parents went all-in and spent a large part of their income paying for a good school.
Years fly by and Charlotte lands jobs at Grab and Meta, with a law degree under her belt.
Going all-in paid off, and by society’s standards, she could just ride it out comfortably.
There was just one tiny little thing in the back of her mind.
She knew she wasn’t special.
Worse - many of her colleagues back in public school never got the chance to thrive.
When Charlotte pictured a life of comfort in Big Tech, something started to brew.
At Meta, she saw first-hand how good the algorithm was at understanding each user and placing the right content on their personal feed.
Yet when teachers prepare exercises, we’re back to cave paintings and pointy rocks.
She starts noticing how teachers do so much manual, heavy-lifting admin.
Up to 50 hours, every month, are spent creating exams and assessments.
One day, Charlotte realizes she’s not gonna stay at Meta much longer.
She gets accepted into Entrepreneur First, in the middle of CV19 lockdowns.
There she meets Rachiket Arya (below, left) an AI engineer working in robotics, and finds her CTO.
Jackett was born.
A B2B company on a mission to unlock every student's potential by empowering teacher’s workflows with AI.
Their 1st step? Automate the 50h educators spend preparing and marking assessments, every month.
They use machine vision and NLP to build custom digital libraries for schools and tuition centers.
Teachers can generate sets of problems adjusted to what their class needs in clicks, not hours.
The mountain ahead is tall:
-The market is huge, but full of legacy systems.
-The most impactful teachers can’t afford much.
-Selling to schools is a slow grind.
Yet when we think failing is a better outcome than staying cosy, cool things happen.
Charlotte closed a 1 million seed round, despite 2022's VC dry spell.
Then she went straight for the market where they could have the most impact - India.
Today, Jackett is used by more than 10,000 teachers.
+500,000 hours of brain-dead admin became new time to help students thrive, every month.
Because the founders didn't listen to experts and set out to solve a problem they couldn’t ignore.
We need more people like Charlotte and Rachiket.
If you know a school director, tuition center or a teacher, Charlotte would love to ask them what features should come next.
You can find her LinkedIn below.
If you know underdogs trying to build cool things, I’d love to meet them.
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Cheers,
Joao
Underdog Founders - Charlotte Joy Trudgill, Rachiket Arya.
#edtech #india #technology