Himanshu Singh’s EdTech start-up wins UNSW’s entrepreneur challenge

First-year business student Himanshu Singh’s early-stage entrepreneurship idea for an education technology (EdTech) company has won first prize in UNSW’s prestigious Peter Farrell Cup (PFC) competition.

Named after Peter Farrell, 2001 Australian Entrepreneur of the Year and founder of ResMed, the contest is an ideas challenge aimed at fast-tracking the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Singh’s team pitch, an EdTech start-up company TeachFlows was selected from 10 team pitches that qualified.

“Our product saves teachers over five hours a week,” Himanshu explained to Indian Link.  “It involves three simple steps: upload a workbook, lesson content, or physical worksheet, match questions with answers using our online tool, and distribute engaging, auto-marked digital activities in less than 2 minutes to the students.”

He added, “Our unique utilisation of evolving machine learning and AI models (generates) dynamic mathematics, science, economics, technology and engineering questions which adapt to an individual student’s skill levels. The questions automatically change in difficulty as a student better grasps key concepts. The product also provides detailed reports to teachers and principals to get a 360-view of their students’ knowledge gaps.”

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TeachFlows was designed by working closely with teachers.

81 teams participated in the competition. Other pitches included a new generation of vending machines, bushfire detection systems, solar panel recycling, and bioprinting. School captain at Girraween High School and champion debater, Singh graduated with an ATAR score of 99.9.

The young impresario’s interests include problem-solving, debating and entrepreneurship.

As he searched for a pitch idea for PFC, he zeroed in on the world he was most familiar with, one that defined 13 years of his life from Kindergarten to Year 12, the world of education.

“Education is the one pillar of society that most clearly defines the discoveries, innovations and movements of the generations to come,” the UNSW scholar remarked. “So, I talked to teachers, principals and well-known educators to find out core problems they’ve faced that ranged from fundamental issues of access to global education to completing simple, repetitive tasks that took up hours of teachers’ valuable time.”

The PFC competition helped facilitate the early start-up journey by providing world-class mentors.

“To win this competition we worked up till 2am alongside our mentor Maz Zaman, practicing our investor pitch slides and presentation as he guided me on go-to-market and startup growth strategies,” Singh said.

The PFC teams pitched their early-stage ideas to judges like Narelle Anderson, founder and MD of Envirobank Recycling, investment pundits Gary Zamel and Trevor Folsom, and the UNSW Science’s Deputy Dean of Education Alison Beavis. Some of the most successful CEOs, startup mentors and experts across multiple industries were also seated in the audience.

Singh’s start-up company TeachFlows, a pertinent product for the foreseeable future, aims to transform classroom resources for the digital age.

450 schools and 35 teachers have already expressed their interest in their early-stage product.

“We are releasing an early version of our product, where education resources can easily be made into unforgettable digital activities very soon,” Singh told Indian Link. “By the end of this year we hope to release our machine learning, adaptive question generation engine that makes assessments, and homework creation much easier for teachers.”

Especially now, since observing the rapid transition towards online exam formats for Selective, Opportunity Class and NAPLAN, and also witnessing a broader industry demand for students to have digital expertise, TeachFlows presents as an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.

“TeachFlows opens up a new era of personalised learning that is not time-consuming, but rather, uses the power of technology to engage and enrich children’s learning journeys,” Himanshu Singh concluded.

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