Sainaptic, a UK-based edtech company, has announced a £1 million funding round to accelerate development of its artificial intelligence-powered assessment marking system. Cornerstone VC and Ufi Ventures co-led the investment, with backing from Elm Venture Partners and Brighteye Ventures.
The startup was established by Kavitha Ravindran and Rajeshwari Iyer, both educated at Cambridge and experienced in education and data science. Their platform targets exam boards and training providers handling vocational and professional qualifications that demand human judgment—essays, reports, presentations and professional discussions rather than standardised multiple-choice formats.
Manual assessment of such work traditionally demands significant time investment from qualified professionals, often consuming up to 90 minutes per submission. This bottleneck creates delays in learner feedback, credential issuance and employment entry while raising operational expenses for assessment bodies.
Sainaptic's AI models, built on domain-specific training data, have demonstrated substantial efficiency gains. The company claims to have reduced marking duration for certain qualifications from 45 minutes to eight seconds, translating to potential yearly cost reductions of £150,000. The platform maintains less than 1 per cent deviation from expert assessor decisions and delivers near-perfect accuracy on work-based skills assessments.
Partnership with Skilltech Solutions
Alongside the funding announcement, Sainaptic has partnered with Skilltech Solutions, an assessment management software provider serving major UK apprenticeship assessment organisations. The collaboration will integrate Sainaptic's AI capabilities with Skilltech's delivery platform and established industry connections.
The joint offering will enable apprenticeship assessment organisations to deploy AI-assisted portfolio marking while preserving qualified assessor oversight of final determinations. Initial deployment will concentrate on portfolio review across selected apprenticeship standards, with room for expansion into wider quality assurance and assessment workflows. The combined solution is scheduled to launch with participating organisations in the first quarter of 2027.
Expansion Plans
Beyond marking and feedback, Sainaptic intends to leverage the new capital to broaden its product suite into quality assurance, analytics and personalised assessments. The company will also strengthen its engineering, product and sales divisions to support this growth trajectory.
Source: Tech.eu
