Rutgers students create Knowt application to aid students, teachers with schoolwork

Several Rutgers students have been involved with the creation of Knowt, an application which uses artificial intelligence to automatically generate quizzes and flashcards from learning materials to help students study and teachers create assignments, said Abheek Pandoh, co-founder and CEO of Knowt as well as a Class of 2020 graduate.

“My co-founders and I started working on Knowt when we were in high school because we were frustrated with how time consuming and work intensive studying had been,” he said.

Pandoh, along with co-founder and chief operating officer (COO) Abhishek Patel, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, said they noticed the majority of in-class time was spent writing notes, but in order to study from them, students had to reformat notes into flashcards with apps like Quizlet. Knowt aims to stop this struggle by having review quizzes and flashcards automatically created.

During the pandemic, Pandoh said that he realized teachers also needed an easy way to create and deliver assignments remotely, and Knowt helped them accomplish this, allowing them to focus more on interacting with and helping students.

The company will soon launch KnowtTakers, which will offer financial compensation for teachers and college students for writing notes on a monthly basis, and will offer volunteer hours for high school students as well, he said. The new version of the app will also allow for the sharing and discovery of notes, so students will be able to search for notes on any topic, even their specific textbook. 

“The goal of this program is to offer students an incredible incentive for taking more notes, and at the same time, give students who still don’t want to take notes a better way to study,” Pandoh said. “The best part about us is that unlike Course Hero, the Knowt app is completely free, we don’t hide notes, and once you see a note you can automatically get a quiz and flashcards from it.” 

He said that while everyone can share notes via Knowt, only the vetted KnowtTakers will be able to earn money or volunteer hours. Individuals will send in their notes, typed or handwritten, and the app will then use artificial intelligence and machine learning to process unstructured text, identify key topics and analyze sentence structures, all of which are then combined to determine questions for review.

“It’s a win-win for everyone, and we hope to make Knowt the central platform for everyone to write, share and view their notes,” Pandoh said.

Students and teachers are encouraged to participate in KnowtTakers because it is an easy way for them to make extra money, he said

“Your potential to earn money on a note every month is infinite, and the more impactful and good notes you take, the more followers you can build on Knowt,” Pandoh said. “Think of this as like creating content on YouTube or TikTok but for notes.”

As CEO and co-founder of Knowt, Pandoh said he runs daily operations across the company, including areas such as design, financials, marketing and product development. 

“As the CEO I am deeply involved in how our product serves our users,” Pandoh said. “Because of this, I have led and designed our products' entire (user interface) around making Knowt enjoyable.”

Patel said that as co-founder and COO, he manages day-to-day operations across the development teams. This includes devising overall product development strategy, contributing daily across the mobile, web and backend teams, as well as finding and recruiting the technical talent to scale their team and product. 

“It's been an amazing experience filled with tremendous opportunities and continuous growth,” he said. “When I started off on the team I was working only on the mobile app, and after just a short amount of time I had moved to lead and grow the mobile team.” 

Zarir Hamza, School of Arts and Sciences junior and head of backend development for Knowt, said that he oversees the development of new features within his team, manages several resources that are crucial for the app and recruits other backend developers.

He said his time so far at Knowt has been very rewarding, mainly due to the knowledge and experience he has gained. 

“The startup experience has been great because my own personal development is closely tied to the company's growth, so every time I learned something new and implemented it into our application, I saw a direct correlation with the growth of the company,” Hamza said. “That personal and intimate connection to my work is what has kept me engaged and motivated to see the company succeed.”

Ramya Ravuri, School of Arts and Sciences junior and Knowt marketing lead, said that she oversees the digital media marketing and graphics for Knowt. Some of her tasks include coming up with ideas to engage with current users through social media platforms, creating engaging graphics and strategizing ways to bring new users onto the app.

“Although I’m studying computer science at Rutgers, working at Knowt has allowed me to explore and identify an unrelated passion of mine in digital marketing,” she said. 

Ravuri said her favorite part about the team dynamic is that every suggestion is taken into consideration, regardless of one’s role. For her, this meant that she was able to see many of her ideas and strategies being implemented in digital marketing strategies and operations, which was very exciting.

“It’s very demanding, but at the same time so inspiring to see our team members (who are all mostly university and even later high school students) working extremely hard to create and deliver on a product that we all believe in,” Pandoh said.