Finding Your Inner Voice

Today's featured startup is attempting to pioneer instructional AI.

Project Overview

Packback’s mission is simple: to help every student become fearlessly curious and find their own voice. The company labels itself as a ‘pioneer of instructional AI’.

Traditional education often prioritizes memorization over critical thinking — students listen to lectures, repeat information back on assignments, and move on. Packback aims to change that by introducing three AI-powered tools designed to enhance learning through inquiry and engagement.

Packback Discussions

The first tool, Packback Discussions, helps educators create a structured discussion space where students can ask each other open-ended questions to deepen their understanding of a topic.

However, any unmoderated forum is at risk of devolving into spam or unproductive chatter. That’s why Packback Discussions comes with AI moderation — not just to enforce respectful communication but to ensure the quality and relevance of student discussions.

For example, if a student asks, “What is osmosis?”, the AI will block it, since the answer can be easily copied from a textbook. Instead, it will prompt the student to rephrase it into an open-ended question, such as “How does osmosis impact different biological systems?” — encouraging deeper thinking.

Beyond moderation, the AI assigns quality scores to each student post based on formatting, citation quality, and intellectual curiosity.

The tool also actively boosts classroom discussions in three key ways:

• Real-time engagement — The AI can publicly praise strong student responses or highlight areas for improvement.

• Participation tracking — Teachers can set minimum participation requirements (e.g., each student must post a certain number of questions and responses per month), and the AI will flag those who haven’t met the quota.

• Classroom analytics — The system generates reports on student engagement, question quality, and overall participation, helping educators assess and grade discussions effectively.

Packback Writing

The second tool, Packback Writing, supports students in writing longer-form assignments (essays, research papers) while streamlining grading for educators.

Its features include:

• Instant AI feedback — Students receive suggestions on how to improve their writing in real time.

• Citation guidance — The AI evaluates source credibility and formats citations automatically.

• AI-assisted grading — Teachers get AI-generated scoring recommendations based on the same criteria used for student feedback, which they can accept or adjust manually.

Packback Originality

This is essentially Packback’s AI-powered anti-plagiarism toolkit. With the rise of ChatGPT and other large language models, AI plagiarism is through the roof across schools and universities worldwide. Packback is trying to fight fire with fire, with its own AI algorithms made to detect fraudulent work.

By integrating Packback into the classroom, educators can shift their focus from correcting basic writing errors to providing meaningful feedback on students’ ideas. The platform has been adopted by over 600 schools and universities across the U.S. and Canada.

Packback recently secured an additional $1.5 million in funding, bringing its total investment to $12.2 million.

What’s the Gist?

The simplest way to use AI in the educational process is when a student uses ChatGPT to complete assignments instead of them: solving problems, writing essays and papers. This method is certainly simple—but it carries no educational value. Even more so—it completely destroys this value.

Packback believes that AI's role in education should not be "replacing" but "guiding" (instructional). In other words, AI shouldn't do anything "instead of" students. It should teach them "how" something can be done—directing their thoughts and actions in the right direction.

This immediately reminds us of the "Socratic method"—a teaching approach once used by Socrates. He said that he couldn't teach anyone anything—he could only make students think.

Therefore, Socrates' teaching method consisted of sequentially asking students questions—by answering which they gradually came to the necessary conclusions themselves. Whether these conclusions were necessary for Socrates or for the student is another question.

What's important is that this became the student's own opinion, fully understood by them.

Sizzle is a startup that raised $7.5 million in its very first round of investment. This startup created an application to help with homework. However, the main principle of the application is not to complete assignments for students, but to give them step-by-step hints so they can complete the assignment themselves. In this way, the Sizzle application transformed from a "solution book" into a learning tool. And this principle is similar to both the Socratic method and today's Packback concept.

Another problem in the educational process is the amount of feedback students receive from the teacher. After all, feedback, not knowledge transfer, is the most important part of learning.

But teachers in regular classrooms and standard courses are generally unable to provide regular and comprehensive feedback to all students in the volume they need—as teachers lack both time and energy for this. And the money they are paid for this teaching.

The emergence of AI allows us to begin solving this task. However, here too, one should not fall into the same extreme as with students completing assignments. If feedback is completely delegated to AI—it can turn into a "hollow" set of general words that don't reflect the teacher's own educational concept.

Graide, a startup that raised £2.5 million in investments, helps teachers reduce the time and effort spent on providing feedback—while staying within their own educational concept. The key feature of their platform is that the AI assistant provides feedback to students based on feedback the teacher has already given on similar work.

And there are quite a lot of similar works in the general flow. Additionally, if a teacher has been teaching the same material for several years—sooner or later they accumulate a database for automatic feedback on almost every variant of a student's answer.

Today's Packback follows the same feedback concept, as their AI engine automatically provides feedback in student chats or on completed work only on typical and formal characteristics—leaving the meaningful part of the feedback to the teacher. But even this saves substantial teacher time and ensures immediacy of typical and formal responses.

And the third problem with traditional education—it's often boring. And when students are bored—the educational material passes by their ears.

AI can help teachers make the learning process more engaging—for example, by generating interesting presentations of new topics and questions for lessons that can spark interest and increase student engagement in the learning process.

Curipod, a Norwegian startup, created a platform that helps school teachers make their lessons more interesting and inspiring—and raised $4.8 million in investments in their very first round to promote their platform in the US.

Packback also tries to engage students in the learning process, but their main tool is organizing and maintaining discussions about topics studied in class.

Key Takeaways

The broader trend in ed-tech is integrating AI tools that enhance, rather than replace, the human learning experience. Companies looking to innovate in this space should focus on:

• Boosting student engagement through interactive and discussion-based learning.

• Increasing the volume and quality of feedback without overburdening teachers.

• Reducing time spent on repetitive tasks (e.g., formatting citations, grading routine assignments).

• Encouraging independent critical thinking, rather than automating answers.

The real danger in AI-driven education isn’t automation itself but a scenario where AI is both the student and the teacher, endlessly reinforcing its own knowledge in a closed loop.

Instead, AI should act more like a calculator: handling the tedious work so that students and teachers can focus on deeper, more meaningful learning.

The AI-education space is still young, and there’s plenty of room for innovation. How else do you think AI could be used to make learning more effective and engaging?Company info:

Packback

• Website: https://packback.co/

• Last funding round:$1.5 million, 21.03.2024

• Total funds raised: $12.2 million after 8 rounds