“Soffos” comes from the Greek word for wisdom, which the Soffos Inc. co-founders determined was a perfect name for their edtech startup.
The company launched its first product in February of 2023: a toolkit that enables customers to add generative AI to their educational products and services. Among the included tools are a software development kit (SDK) and a set of application programming interfaces (APIs). Soffos also offers a toolkit for those who don’t want to code and would prefer to use the existing capabilities of the platform.
Having started on a K-12 learning platform in 2018, Co-Founder and CEO Ken Hubbell realized that customers and investors were more interested in the modular code blocks his company had built than in the actual content of the lessons.
So, Hubbell and his Co-Founder Nik Kairinos pivoted to building a platform on which customers could instead use those modules to build and supplement their own apps. Their customer base is made up of a combination of edtech developers, school systems and individual educators. Early partners for Soffos include companies like Navigant Learning and Xyleme.
“At the end of the day,” Hubbell said, “it’s a partnership that’s a relationship between the instructional designer, the teacher, the educator—and the toolkit.
While Soffos is headquartered in Austin, Texas, Hubbell is located in Raleigh. Other team members are located in Greece, Pakistan and the Philippines.
Soffos is part of this year’s Raleigh-based RIoT Accelerator Program (RAP), which is a 12-week program for early stage startups. Hubbell said the RIoT team leading the program as well as his cohort (we’ve previously covered fellow cohort members Baby Bumps, Social Cascade, and CSPM Zero) are a “fabulous bunch of people.”
“I learned probably more in three days than I had in months of coming into this role as CEO,” Hubbell said.
By the end of the program, Hubbell said he hopes to refine his business plan and pitch deck to help him acquire additional funding and meet the needs of his customer base.
Soffos’ product is sold on a tiered approach, with the first tier offering limited options for free. The individual plan is $18-20 per month, and the enterprise plan is $25-30 per user per month.
With the SDK that comes with Soffos’ product, software developers can create their own apps without needing knowledge of AI or machine learning. There is also a code-assist module which auto-fills code for Soffos Inc.’s services as well as a chat engine that can write code using the SDK.
“We’re enriching all sorts of different types of products, and not limiting ourselves to just the ones that we can create one at a time,” Hubbell said.
For individual educators, the software from Soffos can generate mini lesson plans, generate assessments and score answers with feedback.
Hubbell said that he and his team of 13 employees are currently working on a new iteration of their product with hopes to have it ready later this year.
To date, Soffos has raised $2.1 million, and is now in the seed round of funding. Hubbell and his team are looking to raise an additional $2-4 million, and he said they are “entertaining all offers.”
