VibeGrade: AI grading in Google Classroom and Canvas — a high school dropout selling to his former teachers
Jun 11, 2025 with Daniel
Key Points
- VibeGrade, a Chrome extension that automates grading in Google Classroom and Canvas, has signed three institutional school contracts after growing entirely through organic teacher-to-teacher distribution and viral social media.
- All 100 paying customers are individual teachers funding the product themselves, eliminating institutional procurement friction and validating demand before building student-facing features.
- VibeGrade is betting on ISTE, an edtech conference later this month with 20,000 expected attendees, to accelerate institutional adoption after proving product-market fit with direct sales to teachers.
Summary
VibeGrade is a Chrome extension that automates grading inside Google Classroom and Canvas. Teachers submit papers through the extension, which highlights relevant sections, generates inline comments and a feedback summary, then holds everything for teacher review before it reaches students. Teachers can train the system on their own tone and style. The product is live with 100 paying teachers who are covering costs themselves without needing institutional budget approval.
Daniel and Musa are the co-founders. Daniel dropped out of high school to attend an edtech conference in Orlando and is now selling the product back to teachers at the school he left.
How it works
Students submit a Google Doc or PDF through Classroom or Canvas. VibeGrade opens inside the document via Chrome extension, highlights relevant sections, generates inline comments and a feedback summary, then holds everything for the teacher to review before it reaches the student. Teachers can also train the system on their own tone and style. The next feature in development pushes real-time feedback directly to students as they write, replacing the rough-draft-and-return cycle with a live assistant in the document.
Distribution
All growth so far has been organic. Teachers discover the extension through the Chrome Web Store while installing tools like Grammarly, then share it with colleagues. A meme-driven Instagram and Facebook strategy generated 600,000 views in the past 30 days. Three school contracts were signed last week, marking the first institutional deals and triggering the build-out of the student-facing product.
VibeGrade has booked a 400-square-foot booth at the ISTE edtech conference later this month, expecting around 20,000 teachers in attendance.
Pedagogy
Teachers grading with AI is a reasonable response to students writing with ChatGPT. The real value lies in better, more personalized feedback rather than faster approval of whatever a student generated.