Romanian startup Meta Education, 121,000 € to develop an AI coaching platform

theCoRD.ai platform developed by Meta Education is designed to reduce procrastination tendencies and its related costs in the workplace.

Procrastination is the most expensive invisible cost in business today. A recent study by research firm Basex puts the "cost of unnecessary interruptions" or “delayed work” in terms of lost productivity and innovation at a shocking 650 billion USD.

Another study conducted on more than 2.000 people revealed that an employee earning EUR 40.000 a year wastes 15,000 EUR by procrastinating three hours a day. Moreover, COVID-19 has spawned a global mental health crisis, and that’s feeding one of our more harmful human tendencies: procrastination.

Workplace procrastination is associated with a variety of negative effects, for both the people who engage in it and for those who employ them. First, workplace procrastination leads to reduced productivity and worse performance among employees.

Second, 94% of people indicated that procrastination has a negative effect on their happiness and mental health, and 18% indicated that this effect is extremely negative (American Psychological Association Study, 2020). 

The same happens with the coaching and training programs implemented in big corporations – more that 70% of the identified and planned actions are not to be implemented by the employees.

theCoRD.ai solution is an adaptive gamified coach paired with state-of-the-art coaching content.

The AI-based NLP learning engine will be capable of detecting the key points of a coaching session by analyzing the summarized transcriptions. It then automatically generates follow-up coaching questions and gamified content based on key points in order to close the gap between planning an action and implementing it before it becomes a procrastination cost for the company. 

Meta Education is responsible for creating the adaptive learning engine and their R&D partner – Bucharest University and its Human Language Technologies Research Center - is responsible for designing the artificial intelligence algorithms that will generate suggestions of follow-up questions and insights.

Human Language Technologies Research Center (University of Bucharest) has significant research expertise in different multi-disciplinary areas related to natural language processing, digital humanities, machine learning, cognitive computing, computational linguistics, and general artificial intelligence, which are the core technologies needed to develop the AI engine. Meta Education needs this knowledge transfer from HLT to build a robust product that will be a significant advancement from existing coaching and training solutions in the corporate worlds.

The EUR 121,000 investment received by Meta Education will be used to develop the technological solution, prototype, and test the NLP algorithm in real conditions and continuously improve its performance.

The funds offered for the "Virtual simulated platform for automated coaching-testing" project are part of the "Development of SMEs in Romania" program, supported by the EEA and Norway Grants. 

Meta Education is a Romanian business services & software company, registered in May 2019, and it is part of the MetaSysteme Coaching Community that accounts for more than 5000 international accredited coaches.

Starting with March 2020, the company has upgraded the business operations and attracted new partners experienced in IT&C and financial sectors.

The main strength of the company is the team, with relevant experience in coaching services, neuroscience and development of adaptive NLP engines for the business services industry.