When students begin their freshman year of college, they are often overwhelmed by the vast amount of information they need to keep track of.
When is my next class? What extracurricular activities are happening this week? When is my financial aid information due?
Now, all they have to do is ask.
N-Powered, a company with offices in Boston and Rhode Island, offers an end-to-end platform that connects disparate university data systems and allows students to access information through various digital and artificial intelligence mediums such as the voice-powered Amazon Alexa.
“Students are not feeling engaged; they are feeling very alone,” Joel Evans, co-founder of the company, told Rhode Island Inno. “The most important thing is to get them to feel connected. We want to give them access to information and a sense of belonging.”
“The student is in the center of everything, so if you solve a student problem that directly solves sourcing and engagement problems with the university."
Evans, the founder of Geek.com and one of the leading Alexa developers in the world, teamed up with co-founder and friend Somen Saha, the former director of IT at Northeastern University, to help solve this information overload.
“There is a problem with data,” said Saha. “If you are a student, you have financial aid information in one system and classes and academic coaches in another system and transcripts in another system ... something has to connect all of these things to you.”
Using prebuilt application programming interfaces, Saha and Evans were able to tie all of these individual data systems within a college together and create a “data lake.” They then used platforms like Alexa and Google to give this information back to the students.
However, giving data back to the students is just the tip of the iceberg.
With artificial intelligence, N-Powered will enable faculty and staff at universities to use the data to become more efficient and save money.
For instance, says Saha, collective bargaining laws state that if a university hires a professor but cannot fill the class, the university must let that professor know the class has been cancelled in advance, or face paying them half of their salary.
N-Powered’s data will enable universities to calculate the likelihood of classes being filled and therefore make more informed decisions when it comes to hiring, he said.
In the Spring, N-Powered completed a pilot of its student program with 60 students at Northeastern — as a result the campus call center saw an almost 80 percent reduction in phone requests from those students. Northeastern is now planning to roll out the program to all students starting in the Fall.
N-Powered sells its product straight to universities and then allows them to provide it to students as a value-added service. The company will also work with universities as a design partner, allowing the universities to customize the platform to their liking.
“The student is in the center of everything, so if you solve a student problem that directly solves sourcing and engagement problems with the university,” said Saha.
Going forward, Evans said the goal is to get their platform in as many universities as possible. The company is planning to soon raise a series A round of funding.
