Stylus secures £500k from Sure Valley Ventures to automate school assessment marking.
The funding round was led by artificial intelligence specialist Sure Valley Ventures.
Stylus provides an artificial intelligence platform designed to automate marking and personalised feedback for paper based school assessments. The technology aims to reduce administrative workloads for teachers and improve staff retention across the education sector.
Stylus has secured £500k in funding from Sure Valley Ventures to expand its administrative support platform for schools. The investment will be directed towards infrastructure improvements, trials with prominent educational groups, and marketing preparations ahead of a full commercial launch.
The company develops an artificial intelligence service named LearnCycle, which automates the marking of paper assessments and generates detailed student reports. By removing routine out of hours marking tasks, the platform helps schools address severe teacher retention challenges while maintaining high educational standards.
From the founder
"In my experience, education leaders remain sceptical that strong staff retention and wellbeing in schools can coexist with high standards of marking and feedback. Through our work at stylus we intend to prove this a false dichotomy. I have been working on this problem space since I reluctantly left the classroom for a life without marking 10 years ago, but it’s taken until this point for a solution to be truly viable. Although I made some headway in the past with products that amplified the effort teachers spent marking, what we really lacked was a way of making decisions about students’ work on behalf of their teachers."
Dominic Bristow
CEO and Founder at Stylus
Investor perspective
"Stylus advanced Generative AI technology helps teachers dramatically improve their ability to tackle workloads, with significant implications for the educational landscape. At Sure Valley, we look for ambitious early-stage founders using cutting-edge technologies to solve large pain points for an industry they know inside out. We believe Dominic’s deep domain expertise across both teaching and education technology gives him a strong competitive advantage to succeed in this landscape. We see immense value in Dominic’s solution and are excited to back him at this early stage of his journey as he gears up for a full launch in January 2025."
Barry Downes
Managing Partner, Sure Valley Ventures
Use of funds
- 01Build out infrastructure
- 02Invest in sales and marketing