'As a teacher, I witnessed first-hand how students struggled to understand abstract STEM concepts,' says Francis
Can you tell us more about SnapGrade?
SnapGrade is an AI-powered educational platform that transforms how students learn and how teachers mark work. The more we developed it, the more we realised how much it has the potential to fix our broken education system by providing faster diagnostic feedback to students.
The patent-pending tech allows students to take a picture of their work and get immediate, personalised feedback. What makes it so revolutionary is that it doesn’t just identify errors. It provides constructive guidance tailored to each person’s learning style and greatly reduces the marking workload. This means a teacher can spend 95% less time marking and more time teaching.
From teaching to tech start-ups, you’ve had a remarkable career. What’s been your proudest moment so far?
Winning Innovate UK’s 2024 Unlocking Potential Award was a defining moment that validated the vision for fixing our education system and this developed into SnapGrade.
Another highlight was when SnapGrade was selected for the Turk AIX Programme, which was developed by the Foreign Commonwealth Office, and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology. The initiative supports promising AI start-ups across the UK and Turkey, helping them form global partnerships.
What’s been the biggest challenge?
Navigating the UK’s investment landscape in 2023-4 was challenging. Investors were apprehensive post-COVID, so it was more difficult to secure funding. We’ve now completed our pre-seed round, but pushing through that period was hard. We had to rely on small-scale investments. But if we can get through that, we can get through anything!
Why is making STEM education accessible to people from all backgrounds so important?
I firmly believe that education changes lives. I place a big emphasis on STEM because it’s all about developing critical thinking skills. By making these skills more accessible to all people, we’re creating more diverse scientific and technological work forces.
This helps us empower people to become more informed citizens and meaningfully participate in society’s most important conversations. With SnapGrade, we’ve seen how immediate and personalised feedback removes barriers to education for students from under-represented backgrounds. Many of these may lack access to private one-to-one tutoring, well-funded schools or other resources outside the classroom.