VibeGrade: AI grading in Google Classroom and Canvas — a high school dropout selling to his former teachers

Awesome guys. Let's bring in the next team and let's uh tell you about linear linear app. Use it to manage your projects. Half at least half the badges, I think. So, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good. Nice to meet you. My hand in water. I'm going to not shake your hand. Good to meet you.

Uh let's start with an introduction. Uh who are you guys? What are you guys building? And please microphone as close to this as possible. Yeah. Uh I'm Daniel. Uh and this is Musa and we're the co-founders of Vibe Grade. What do you guys do?

So, we help teachers save time grading papers directly in their existing learning management system. What's the response been like? Uh, do the teachers love it? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, all of our customers are paying out of pocket, right? Really? Wow. Okay. Interesting. Uh, you said in their LMS. Yes.

So, who are you plugging into? Who's the most dominant platform providers right now? So, the main one, the best integration is on Google Classroom. Oh, interesting. So, a lot of is Blackboard not a thing anymore? Not that much. We we got a request for it but most teachers are on Google Docs and Canvas.

So like most K to2 which we serve are on Google Docs in classroom. We have toddle as well but it's mainly those few. Makes sense. Yeah. But for universities they like Canvas is great like they can it'll go and highlight actual sections.

So can you add that on as like one of those like if I'm in Google Docs I can I can do an addiction. It's a Chrome extension. Okay. So we realized that teachers they don't want to have to learn a new tool and go to a new platform to do that. So we bu in that works directly with Google Docs and directly with Canvas.

So it's easy as clicking a button and then we open up a window inside Google. Yeah. So walk me through the typical like workflow homework. I assume it's like the student uses the the teacher Daniel to write the questions. The student uses chat GBT to write the answers and then the teacher goes back and check it.

You guys grade it. But but what's the actual workflow in the loop at all? Our students are students sending uh Google Docs links to their teachers when they're done. So So Daniel was just in high school, so he really knows how this works. You dropped out of high school. Get the bottle of wine. Congratulations. Yeah.

High school dropout. Chad. Yeah. You front ran everybody. Everybody that was like coming into demo day. Oh yeah. I dropped out of college. It's like that's how it played out. You had to up to go further. Yeah. I mean, so you're selling I think we heard about you earlier.

You're selling it back to your teachers now like that you at school you dropped out of sort of. I mean they don't really like me that much for some reason. Yeah. Like on my final exam. Well, I mean I I skipped finals to go fly to we went to this edtech conference in Orlando.

So I guess they don't really like me because of that. But we we had to bring in more teachers. Well they'll like you when you're the commencement speaker in a couple years maybe hopefully.

So the workflow is where teachers usually they students submit on Google classroom or like canvas they submit a Google doc or a PDF and then the teacher opens it up the doc and they grade it within by like highlighting certain sections adding comments a summary of the feedback.

So we do that whole process uh right in the Google doc and then we have the teacher review everything. They can speak to our system to understand their tone and their style. So then we add those comments. How how is the actual like testing and grading and homework process changing?

Cuz I imagine that the like the solution to chat GBT homework is probably everyone's on a laptop typing the answers in the classroom and there's a monitor watching that you're not just AIing it and then it can be AI graded and then that's a win for everyone. Is that roughly what's happening? Yeah.

Like the thing that we've seen is like people say all the time, you know, like students are writing with chatbt, teachers are going to grade with AI. Like what's the whole point?

Well, the objective of the student is to learn and if you're just using like chat and mindlessly submitting something, well then you're not doing the right thing. Um there's always going to be a way to get around it.

Um if you really don't want to learn but like for teachers the main like objective is to give students the best feedback and instruction. Yeah. So what we're doing is just enabling them to do that a lot better because even in school when like our teachers would give us just like generic copypaste feedback. Yeah.

So we just want to give students the best feedback possible. gives teachers their time back and they really get the value because they're the ones experiencing the benefits. Yeah. Talk to me about the top of Why would you not at one point just give the tool to students as well? Yeah, 100%.

That's actually what we're working on next. So, we just signed three contracts with with schools last week. Okay. Congratulations.

and they want to be able to give this tool to students so that while they're writing um they're going to get real time feedback on their Google doc as if the teacher were adding comments in real time.

So it's sort of like you know you submit a rough draft to your teacher they have to grade it and then give it back to you and then you can do a final draft. Instead of that why not just have like the assistant give you feedback in real time. Oh yeah that makes sense on the doc. Yeah that's great.

Uh talk to me about the top of funnel. How are you telling teachers that this works? I imagine at the price point you can't do handtohand combat sales. Uh how are you getting in front of teachers these days?

So all of like we have 100 teachers that are paying completely out of pocket and all of that has been organic through either the Chrome web store. So they find that's when they install another extension like Grammarly and then they tell their friends about it. So word of mouth has been really strong.

We got 600,000 views on Instagram and Facebook in the past 30 days. There we go. We just started posting like memes and things like that and teachers really they they share it and then they look at our page and so they find us there. That's great.

So that's the top of funnel up until this point and we're going to start pumping out more like UGC style content. We're actually going to the biggest edtech conference in the US at the end of this month. The Super Bowl of Ed.

Yeah, there's going to be 20,000 teachers there and we got a really big we bought a 400 foot booth there and we're going all out for it trying to reach as many teachers as possible. Congratulations. You guys make your first uh money on the internet. Thank you. How did we first make back?

I I used to make I used to make websites for like random people. I charged like this pastor in New Jersey like $3,000 to make his church a website. Wow. Yeah. That was back when I was maybe 16.

I made like a a mental health chat app in like grade 10 and like a couple of people like one person in Japan found it and they installed it and paid for it. They paid for it. That's amazing. Congratulations. Have a great demo day. Great to meet you. Yeah, you really rooting for high school's cooked.

Call us when you meet the first. Yeah, we're good. We got middle school dropout middle school dropout. That's how I was going with that. Welcome to the stream. We are live from YC Demo Day 2025. Good