<h3>Ann Education co-founder Yotam Shtayner talks about taking part in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud, and about using AI and machine learning to transform legacy educational content.</h3>
<p>Ahead of Web Summit 2022, we sat down with Yotam Shtayner, co-founder and CEO of Ann Education (aka Ann), an Israel-based edtech startup that’s a recent alum of the <a href="https://startup.google.com/accelerator/cloud/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud</a>.</p>
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<h3>Hi Yotam. Tell us about how you came to co-found Ann. What was the gap in the edtech market that you spotted?</h3>
<p>Ann was first born as a solution to personalise education. While working directly with students and teachers, we realised that schools are actively seeking new technologies to enhance student learning, yet face difficulty adopting such services because they require them to switch from the learning materials they’re already familiar with.</p>
<p>In parallel, publishers, who provide teachers with the materials they know and love, are struggling to convert their legacy content into great interactive experiences – a demand that is becoming increasingly standard in today’s market, further accelerated by Covid-19.</p>
<p>After investing decades into producing, distributing, and adapting their existing titles, publishers suddenly found their materials (and their primary source of revenue) to be insufficient in meeting the quickly changing needs of the market.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://websummit.com/wp-media/2024/02/aIksNfKP-1663833761195-1.jpg" alt="Profile image of Ann co-founder Yotam Shtayner" width="400" height="400" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-80842" /><br />
<center><em>Ann co-founder Yotam Shtayner. Image: <a href="https://www.ann-education.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Ann Education</a></em></center></p>
<p>Understanding this gap, Ann became a solution to empower educational content creators in their digital transformation, enabling them to seamlessly transform their existing assets into fully interactive products while maintaining their original design and title pedagogy.</p>
<p>In doing so, Ann saves them time and money on content regeneration while providing a competitive edge as they leverage their cash cow in this rapidly growing market.</p>
<p>In the market today, textbooks are taken as-is and made digital, but the content remains static, just like the print edition. It’s important to note that we’re not just digitising textbooks, but making the content come to life.</p>
<p>As a result, the students are able to interact with the book on a desktop, mobile or tablet, gain immediate assessment for their answers, and study the book in a gamified manner, while their teachers receive data-driven insight into their progress – all within the textbook.</p>
<p>Here’s an <a href="http://ann-education.web.app" rel="noopener" target="_blank">example of a textbook</a> that has been ‘Annified’.</p>
<p><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://websummit.com/wp-media/2024/02/ovH1ZKWp-ann-education-maths-problems-744x1024.jpg" alt="Interactive educational material developed by Ann, showing mathematical problems to solve" width="600" height="826" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-81239" /><br />
<span class="caption"><em>Interactive educational material developed by Ann. Image: <a href="http://www.ann-education.com" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Ann Education</a></em></span></p>
<h3>What motivated you to begin this journey, and how was the team behind Ann built?</h3>
<p>The reason we began our journey was that, as students, we felt that we couldn’t reach our full potential within the academic system because students receive their education in an outdated manner that hasn’t changed in over a century.</p>
<p>Among our founding team, none of us holds an academic degree. We are three co-founders with different backgrounds. My experience includes managing impact initiatives, Dan [Bar Or] specialises in UX/UI design, and Elad [Sulami] brings over 20 years of experience as a full-stack developer and team lead.</p>
<p>Counting 29 employees today, Ann consists of a multidisciplinary team that includes expertise in business, technology, design, pedagogy and more. The team comes from diverse backgrounds and countries, yet we all share the same passion for reinventing learning.</p>
<p>Ann is currently hiring in various fields, searching for people who hold the same values and desire to innovate the learning experience around the world.</p>
<h3>Can you tell us how Ann uses machine learning and the cloud to transform educational content? How essential is the cloud to what your product does?</h3>
<p>Ann uses machine learning and computer vision to automate the legacy content transformation. The process still involves a human touch in order to improve the machine learning model’s accuracy and speed, but will eventually become fully automated as we continue training the machine.</p>
<p>Our goal is to offer an automated, self-serve service allowing users to upload their static educational content, including exercises, and convert it into interactive content immediately.</p>
<p>With Ann being built on Google Cloud, all Google Cloud services (including AutoML) are available to us and can be easily integrated. Using the Google Cloud Platform conveniently allows us to allocate more resources towards developing Ann’s core technologies, rather than on DevOps maintenance.</p>
<h3>How is Ann currently being used by customers? Can you give us an example of how it helps students engage better with learning materials?</h3>
<p>Publishers use Ann to convert their existing static material (typically under PDF formats) into interactive content, as we’re the only available solution that uses a SaaS model that preserves the design and pedagogy of their titles while requiring little to no intervention from the publisher.</p>
<p>Instead of developing new interactive materials, publishers save significant resources while ‘Annifying’ their assets, making textbooks fully digitally interactive.</p>
<p>In doing so, publishers can further establish new revenue channels and gain additional market share for their previously developed content, while future-proofing their assets in today’s ever-changing technological climate.</p>
<blockquote><p>“With Ann, students are able to interact with gamified dynamic materials &#8230; receive immediate assessments for their answers, and report their progress to their teachers – all in a single place.”</p></blockquote>
<p class="quoteAuthor">– Yotam Shtayner, Ann Education</p>
<p></p>
<p>Schools can now keep the content of their choice while providing their students with a cutting-edge digitally interactive experience, overcoming the bad experience of static PDFs and student disengagement.</p>
<p>With Ann, students are able to interact with gamified dynamic materials and solve all textbook exercises on their devices, receive immediate assessments for their answers, and report their progress to their teachers – all in a single place.</p>
<p>Using Ann, teachers receive student insights and can help each individual progress at their own pace while monitoring and stimulating class progress as a whole.</p>
<h3>How was your experience taking part in the Google for Startups Accelerator: Cloud? What did you and your team achieve and learn?</h3>
<p>By participating in the programme, we accelerated the development of deep technology in our product. It would have taken us more time and resources to achieve this progress and to build our market defensibility without Google’s assistance.</p>
<p>It is very valuable to be able to access a worldwide network of experts, ready to assist you right away. Google is much more than just an accelerator, since it consists of competent, motivated and open individuals – from mentors to specialists – within the different departments.</p>
<h3>Would you recommend the Accelerator to other startups?</h3>
<p>We recommend participation for other startups. Google counts on a vast network of global experts across the board, and they can help you leverage your technology and business to a higher standard.</p>
<h3>What stage of growth is Ann at, and what plans do you have going forward in terms of business growth and funding rounds?</h3>
<p>After achieving a product-market fit in various markets, including the United States, Western Europe, Africa and Israel, we’re now initiating an investment round for add-value investors in order to accelerate our growth rate and impact millions of students around the world.</p>
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<h3>AI and machine learning technologies and methods are constantly evolving and getting more sophisticated. How do you see Ann evolving in the next five years?</h3>
<p>Ann will be fully automated and self-serve long before that five-year window lapses. Every corporation, and even individuals such as teachers, will be able to upload static content into Ann and, like magic, it will be ‘Annified’ immediately.</p>
<p>AI enables us to scale and automate tasks that previously required a great deal of effort, and make them accessible to everyone, everywhere. We believe that modern digital learning should not be a privilege, and we’re committed to making it easier than ever to create and distribute interactive learning experiences using AI.</p>
<h3>If you could only give one piece of advice to edtech or edtech-adjacent startups working with Cloud technologies, what would it be?</h3>
<p>There is a wide selection of tools available through cloud technologies, and we recommend exploring and experimenting with them. For example, we had to implement text-to-speech and translation functionalities in our software and, by utilising Google Cloud Platform tools, these features were live and available in the product within just a few days.</p>
<h4>At Web Summit 2022, Google Cloud will have a booth with a number of demos for developers and startups. The company will also be operating the Google Cloud Startup Campus masterclass area in Pavilion 1, delivering more than 40 sessions throughout the event. <a href="https://inthecloud.withgoogle.com/startup-resource-build/home.html" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Learn more</a> about why startups are choosing Google Cloud.</h4>
<p><em>Main image of Ann Education’s management team at the Google for Startups campus in Israel: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Google</a></em></p>


Group photo of Ann’s Management team in Google for Startups campus Israel

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