Aristotle's avatar presents a slideshow about Greece. Prof Jim customers will be able to request avatars for whomever they’d like, be it a long dead celebrity or a specific classroom teacher.
Courtesy of Prof JimWould students be more engaged in class if Sacagawea was the one teaching them about the Lewis and Clark Expedition? Would they retain more information if Aristotle explained the art of storytelling during their writing seminar? Would an English lecture delivered by Jane Austen, and complete with slides and pop quizzes, play well with Gen-Z?
Gimmicky? Maybe. But at a time when students are turning to TikTok for information (however unreliable) and avatars in the metaverse are a thing, artificial intelligence startup Prof Jim is betting that for at least some students, this novel approach to learning could work.
The text-to-video company, which publicly launched today after two years of development, uses AI to turn textbook PDFs into powerpoint video lectures, narrated by avatars of either famous historical figures or contemporary teachers. Co-founded and led by Deepak Sekar, 40, a PhD engineer and repeat entrepreneur, the startup is aiming to capitalize on the trend toward video-based learning by offering textbook publishers a cheap way to produce video content for their materials. “There are hundreds of thousands of textbooks out there,” Sekar said. “If we can convert textbooks into video, we believe that’s a very, very attractive market opportunity.”
It costs between $25,000 and $150,000 to create video content for a course from scratch, depending on the length of the video, according to Sekar. Prof Jim declined to share specific price information, but said it will offer its services for less than a tenth of what it would otherwise cost to produce a similar video. To create the videos, a publishing company sends a textbook PDF to Prof Jim, where Sekar and his team will run the PDF through their AI software. The AI will scan the PDF and automatically create presentation slides that reflect the material, generate a script for an avatar to read during the video, and, if requested, embed clickable quiz questions. The entire process is complete in as little as 30 minutes, and all that’s left for a Prof Jim team member to do is verify the text and choose one of four photos the AI has offered up for each slide.
Sekar and his co-founders Pranav Mehta and Maria Walley have raised $1.5 million to date, including $1.09 million of seed funding in January from Avalanche VC, Behind Genius Ventures, Hannah Grey and other undisclosed investors. The startup is valued at about $8 million.
Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing director of Avalanche VC and a former managing director at the textbook giant Pearson, was impressed by Sekar and optimistic about potential future applications of the Prof Jim software. “He was bringing deep tech to a sector that really didn’t have very much, or didn’t use tech very effectively,” Donnelly said.
Sekar is a prolific inventor—he holds more than 200 patents. Several are related to robotics and AI, and about a dozen are related to flash memory, the dominant memory technology in smartphones. In 2014, after he grew tired of cooking at home, Sekar founded Chowbotics, a food preparation robotics company. A three foot by three foot robot (named Sally) that made salads and bowls using up to 22 ingredients, was the company’s premier product. DoorDash bought Chowbotics in February 2021, but the food delivery app shut down the project less than a year and a half later.
Sekar says he opted not to join DoorDash after the acquisition because he believed the project to be in good hands. He took away two lessons from Chowbotics’ demise: that young businesses often fail without a founder involved, and that acquired companies must add value to the acquirer’s core business, rather than serve as a side project. But it’s too early to say what the future of Prof Jim will be or whether it could end up in the hands of an already established business, Sekar adds.
The Bay Area-based entrepreneur came up with the idea for Prof Jim during the pandemic, when his two daughters, now ages seven and 10, attended school online.
“My younger one didn’t really take to it very well,” Sekar said. “She was crashing a lot of my Zoom meetings saying she was bored with her online class.” He sat with her during one of her classes, and noticed the teacher’s face was not well lit and they rarely made eye contact with the students. Much of the time, the teacher was bent down, writing. “When I looked at that, I was thinking ‘Hey, the technology is pretty primitive,’” he said. “We should be able to do way better than this.’”
Even before the pandemic brought virtual schooling mainstream, young people increasingly preferred video tools for learning. A 2018 study by Pearson found that while 60% of millennials liked to use textbooks to study, only 47% of Gen Z-ers did. Moreover, 59% of Gen Z-ers preferred YouTube as a learning tool, compared to 55% of millennials. The old guard is catching on; McGraw Hill, a 132-year-old textbook publisher, recently debuted a TikTok-like app to help students study alongside their textbooks. Sekar said Prof Jim is already working with at least one “giant textbook company,” which he declined to name.
Sekar’s own avatar will teach several free programming courses on the Prof Jim site. The avatar is strikingly similar to Sekar. It also dons parted dark hair and smiles along naturally with the script, but it’s a bit slimmer in the face (his wife jokes that he fed the AI a six-month old photo).
“This got a 98% score on Amazon Rekognition, meaning it looked pretty similar to my real face in terms of position of the eyes and nose and mouth,” Sekar said of his digital clone. “Many smartphones use Amazon Rekognition for Face ID. Right now, if you get more than an 85% score, it opens up a smartphone.”
Prof Jim has also generated avatars for historical figures, including Aristotle, Ada Lovelace, Sacagawea and Jane Austen. Customers will be able to request avatars for whomever they’d like, be it a long dead celebrity or a specific classroom teacher. The company can also create avatars for living or recently deceased famous people, as long as it gets permission from the celebrity or their estate. Anyone who died at least 100 years ago is fair game.
While Sekar’s avatar matched his face, the voice did not match his voice. Neither did Sacagawea’s—she spoke with a machine-generated, British accent. This is by design, Sekar said. He hopes that the software will prevent teachers from being limited by their accent or home tech set-up. There will be no bad hair days with Prof Jim, he vows.
“When I travel, sometimes people have no idea what I’m saying,” said the Indian born Sekar. “With our software, I can create courses where people can learn from what I’m saying—and not get distracted by how I am saying it.”
The startup plans to offer a product directly to teachers in the next six months, but Sekar declined to share much about it. Says Sekar: “Our task is to create amazing instruction with the help of AI and help teachers really create magic for students.”
