Anant Agarwal Transitions from edX to CEO of Grady, an AI Start-Up Specializing in Assessment and Feedback

IBL News | New York

Anant Agarwal, the founder of the edX platform, professor at MIT, and, since 2021, Chief Academic Officer at 2U, was hired as CEO of Grady, a Millburn, New Jersey-based, faculty-founded AI start-up specializing in grading and feedback. Agarwal will remain Founder and Senior Advisor at edX/2U.

“Grady holds every student to the instructor’s standard, and it keeps the instructor in charge. It effectively supercharges faculty and teaching assistants,” said Agarwal. 

Founded by two university professors, Periklis Papakonstantinou of Rutgers University and Anastasios Sidiropoulos of the University of Illinois at Chicago, it is currently backed by Neotribe Ventures.

“Every student deserves precise, fair feedback that helps them grow, whether in a ten-person seminar or a four-hundred-person course, at an Ivy or a community college,” explained Papakonstantinou.

The instructor sets the standard, and Grady applies it across the course, so the same work is judged the same way whether it is the first assessment graded or the 80th. Students get detailed feedback while the material is still fresh, and faculty get back hours otherwise spent grading, along with a clearer view of the concepts a class has not yet grasped.

In conversation with IBL News this week, Anant Agarwal [in the picture] said,

“What drew me to Grady is the problem it takes on. Feedback and grading are incredibly important parts of learning and among the hardest to do well in a constrained educational system. At edX, we tried to build AI grading as far back as 2012, and I know firsthand how difficult it is. When I saw what Periklis and Anastasios had built, I was initially skeptical, so I tried it on my own MIT assignments. I was blown away! It graded handwritten work, schematics, and sketches, providing detailed feedback and requiring no training.”

“I have long believed that AI has the potential to make every teacher a super teacher. Grady is the clearest example of that I have seen. It keeps the instructor fully in control, steering, reviewing, and editing the feedback and grades before they reach students, and it gives faculty their time back for the human parts of teaching that matter most. Used this way, AI amplifies the teacher rather than replacing them.”

“This is an inflection point for education, much like the arrival of online learning was 15 years ago. I am energized to be building again and to help shape how AI strengthens teaching and learning in the years ahead.”