Azota

Founded in 2021 by Dai Nguyen (COO), Hung Le, and Au Nguyen, Azota is the only local edtech product endorsed by the Ministry of Education and Training for the 2021 national online teaching training program.

The online platform lets teachers create and grade tests automatically and at the same time offers real-time exam proctoring and student performance tracking tools.

When the COVID-19 pandemic led to an abrupt shift from in-person classes to virtual learning, the students weren’t the only ones affected. The teachers needed to step up and adjust to the situation. Before founding Azota, Au, who was working at Viettel at the time, led an educational unit on school management solutions, and that’s when he witnessed the many recurring issues teachers face daily. His team could not solve all of it then. Realizing the pain points in online learning, Au teamed up with his friends Dai and Hung.

As a result, they built an optical character recognition app to automatically recognize Q&As from test images taken from teachers' phones. It shuffles those questions and answers to create hundreds of modified test combinations. Since the OCR was built using Vietnamese teaching materials, the team said it could recognize Vietnamese tests with a 99% accuracy rate.

The platform is designed with a focus on simplicity and perfectly fits with the behaviors of the majority of Vietnamese teachers. In just a year, Azota already has covered 30% of the national population, with about 22% coming from the major cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh. In addition, they have supported 700,000 teachers and 10 million students and produced 300 million assignments/tests.

Aside from the endorsement from the Ministry of Education, the company also won the Gold Prize in the Make in Vietnam contest awarded by the Prime Minister and Minister of Information and Communications in December 2021.

In July 2022, Azota received $2.4M In Pre-Series A From GGV Capital, Do Ventures.