The Future Is Now: Ramesh Balan Of Knomadix On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up Healthcare
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
I wish someone had told me that bringing about change in K-12 is not easy, especially when it comes to evolving the core educational delivery from a passive learning model to an active learning model. It requires extensive resources, and also guidance from key educators in your team. When we started, we were not prepared for this.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ramesh Balan of Knomadix.
Ramesh Balan is a serial entrepreneur, a successful business executive, inventor and technologist who has always believed in thinking differently — using unconventional outside-the-box approaches to solve large-scale complex problems in many industries, including interactive media, telecom, healthcare, and education.
Ramesh’s latest venture, Knomadix, has created a virtual lessonbot platform powered by AI to deliver personalized learning at scale. Knomadix’s proprietary patent-pending technology expands on a teacher’s capabilities, giving them the ability to capture deeper insights into how each and every student in their class learns, including any gaps in their knowledge, and then offering targeted remediation. With Knomadix, teachers improve student performance by leaps and bounds in a highly efficient and effective manner.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My pleasure.
I’ve always been in technology spaces, tinkering, inventing and thinking of ways to make things better with technology. One area where I’ve been paying attention for a long time is in education and I am a big believer in the power of technology to expand the reach, quality and outcomes of learning at all levels.
This company, Knomadix, is not my first tech company or even my first education company. So it’s fair to say I came to education through technology and not the other way around. It’s also fair to say I care very deeply about both. My mother was a high-school math teacher, which made a big impression on me at a young age. Technology has been my career focus, so putting these two passions together has been very rewarding.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I don’t know if it’s the most interesting but I worked in very early computer graphics for TV and commercials. I had the opportunity to work under the “father of computer graphics and animation,” Dr. Chuck Csuri. We built computer graphics and animation sequences for all the major TV networks including NBC, ABC, CBS and ESPN. I always thought that was kind of interesting and it certainly helped develop a larger-than-life perspective on what is possible with technology.
Can you tell us about the cutting edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
At Knomadix, we have developed a way for teachers, district-level instructional staff and publishers to deploy their own AI-powered teaching bots into any lesson, in any type of format whether in a text or video, or even in a multi-modal interactive format. We like to say that we didn’t create education bots, we created an education bot factory. Teachers and other lesson developers can use bots at any level, in any subject to add richness, instant feedback mechanisms and personalized learning support to every lesson, catering to the individual needs of every student.
The impact of this capability is immense. We think it’s like being able to clone every teacher and have them engaged with every student on any single concept on any given lesson — or all of them — at the same time. It’s like having super-teachers and one-on-one tutors available on-demand, with each one designed to suit the needs of every classroom across every school. We’re not replacing teaching, we’re making teachers into superheroes.
How do you think this might change the world?
There has been extensive research over the past few decades about how one-on-one teaching is the most important key to accelerated learning and mastery of a topic. Imagine if we could give every student, everywhere in the world their own custom tutor on every subject, 24 hours a day. Keep in mind that this is not a tutor that’s developed by a software company or a textbook publisher. This is a tutor that has been trained and put in place by school systems for teachers — the one person who knows where their students have been struggling and who sees the road map ahead.
This is a game changer. For each individual learner, the support we provide can change a failing student to a passing or even an excelling student. At scale, it’s potentially as big a breakthrough as the printing press or the Internet. I see our technology as giving schools the ability to clone and multiply master teacher capabilities across the district, like the printing press allowing clones of a book to be rapidly produced and spread across the globe.
Think about how that changed the world and the ability to grow knowledge where before there was no opportunity due to distance or financial or social limitations. Knomadix is the same concept. The master teacher’s strength is in their ability to address an individual student’s needs rapidly, frequently, and without tiring. Knomadix clones those capabilities but based entirely on that master teacher’s directions. We see the Knomadix lessonbot platform as the foundation for the future of education across many geographical regions around the world.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Since Knomadix is technology allowing teachers to gain superpowers and take their instruction to the next level, honestly, no. Remember that our product does not teach. Teachers remain at the front of the class. Rather, this technology allows teachers to be better and more present because we automate the grading and feedback process. As such, it’s pretty powerful and quite benign.
The only drawback that comes to mind is overlooking the ability we have as technologists to give teachers tools to save them time. If we don’t find new ways to address the needs of our students, then we risk falling short of the pace of advancement in other facets of our lives.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
It’s less a tipping point and more of an evolution. The closest true tipping point we’ve seen in education was remote learning forced by the pandemic, however Knomadix has been in development since well before the pandemic. In fact, “personalized” learning has been a goal since the first home computer was developed. You could even say since the first tutor or first homework assignment.
Getting to truly personalized learning has a significant hurdle, however. That hurdle has always been finding a way to maintain the individual nature of learning and student-to-teacher interaction, yet infuse the scale that the Internet and technology can provide. It’s how to make it massive while also keeping it custom and human. That evolution has been going on for 20 years at least and I’m not saying our solution is the end of the journey but we think it’s a big piece of that significant advance in closing the loop between teaching and learning and the efficiencies of technology.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
It’s just awareness and comfort, honestly. As teachers start to use Knomadix and they see students learning more, faster and more deeply, it will spread. The word is already spreading. You can’t keep innovations that work from spreading.
It’s not a matter of if this technology becomes widespread but how long it will take — when it will move from brushfire to wildfire. Education needs what we have and we’re ready.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
We’ve been doing the usual things such as pilot programs — which are critical in education — training programs, some public relations and marketing, and also having discussions with state-level and district-level leadership and sponsors who understand what we’re doing. I am not sure whether that’s innovative marketing or not. But it’s what can be done and I think it’s working.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I have an army of people to thank: teachers and education leaders who have helped shape the product, mentors, investors, and advisory board members. But if I were to pick one person, that would be my mother. As mentioned before, my mom was a high school math teacher, who also served as a principal and later retired as the superintendent of schools for the entire city of Madras in India. My mother instilled the importance of education from a very early age. She also got me very interested in math, which later translated into degrees in engineering and computer science. More importantly, being a single mom, my mother taught me how to be resilient and have an unbreakable resolve about one’s mission, especially when you are on a mission to change the world for the better. Having lost my father when I was seven years old, I got to grade high school math assignments, when I was just nine years old. Apart from making math one of my strong subjects, it also taught me dedication and hard work at a young age. My mom has been and always will be my main source of inspiration and guiding light with my ventures and life.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Education may be the area in which someone can bring the most goodness to the most people. We know this and we’ve known it for millennia. It’s possible to use technology in nearly limitless ways, on things that could make far more money or give someone fame. But education is really about delivering that good, being a force for profound personal and social change. So, again, by starting in technology and using that to improve education is really, I think, bringing and spreading “goodness.”
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why.
I wish someone had told me that solo entrepreneurship is difficult, especially when you’re aiming to build a platform that has the potential to change the future of education. When you have a partner right from the beginning, it gives you the opportunity to bounce ideas off of each other, to share the workload, and to balance your focus between product innovation, go-to-market and fund raising. Granted you do run the risk of not being on the same page. During this long startup journey — all things considered — I feel that for a startup like ours, it would have made my life a whole lot easier to have a partner. It might have accelerated our company development and growth.
I wish someone had told me that bringing about change in K-12 is not easy, especially when it comes to evolving the core educational delivery from a passive learning model to an active learning model. It requires extensive resources, and also guidance from key educators in your team. When we started, we were not prepared for this.
I also wish someone had told me selling to schools and the go-to-market approach for schools is different from selling to enterprises. The sales cycle is cyclical, the decision making is multi-level and distributed, the users and decision makers are not the same, budget and resources are scarce, and introducing systemic changes into the school systems takes years to put into place.
I also wish someone had told me that building game changing platforms and bringing them to market takes a significant amount of capital. The bigger and broader the opportunity, the larger the capital needs, and the need to bring in visionary investors early in the process.
Lastly, I wish someone had told me that it is important to build a solid network of mentors and advisors who have deep knowledge about the industry and go-to-market experiences. To get a company like Knomadix off the ground, it was important to have this group assembled right from the first year of the business.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Teachers need more support, more pay, and better tools that can leverage and multiply their talents and passions. Technology leaders can marshal these resources including political and social prestige, pay, and especially better teaching and learning tools. Education is not a lifeboat, it’s a tide that lifts all boats. It’s the investment that sustains all other investments.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” — Mahatma Gandhi
This quote keeps me grounded and allows me to live in the present every day.
Some very well known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
Education is the key to growing economies and sustaining social change. And it’s possible to do well, do very good things, and be rewarded. It’s a sweet spot and when you find it, the possibilities are astounding. We think our customized, AI-driven teaching bot solution is one of those sweet spots and we invite passionate partners to help us develop and share it.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
We are active mostly on our website so that teachers can access our resources. Read about us at Knomadix.com.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
The Future Is Now: Ramesh Balan Of Knomadix On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
