How Yellowdig is reimagining education through tech-fueled human interaction

Technology changes the way people are educated, and one Philadelphia company is using it to transform how students learn by supercharging their human connection.

Yellowdig, a community-focused learning platform, was founded in 2015 by Shaunak Roy. At the time, highly collaborative experiential learning was an impactful trend in education — one that took a hit when the pandemic moved students out of classrooms and into virtual meetings.

That shift was an opportunity for Yellowdig.

“Even though the learning experience during the pandemic wasn’t that great — everybody kind of used Zoom — at least people got used to using technology,” Roy told Technical.ly. 

Yellowdig uses technology to foster a more experiential learning environment with engagement and collaboration that enhances what students learn in the classroom. 

Transforming student engagement

Roy, who lives in South Jersey, came to the US about 20 years ago from India to get his master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after completing his undergrad degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

“I always noticed that I was never engaged in the classroom — I love learning, but I never found sitting in a classroom that interactive and engaging,” Roy said.

Most of the engagement, he said, was happening outside of classes. He realized that the education he and others spent so much time and money on was still based on an education model from the industrial era of 300 years ago.

“We still look at learning that way,” Roy said. “And I wanted to challenge that.”

So, instead of using technology by digitizing the blackboard or using Zoom in a way that doesn’t encourage engagement, Yellowdig was created as a platform for students to interact with both the instructors and each other, with relevant conversations and project building. 

The platform is similar to the social media students are already comfortable with, but instead of posting about the latest gossip or trading memes, they’re talking about what they’re studying, and adding a layer to what they learn in class.

“We want to create something which is interesting and engaging, and really pulls in the students in a natural way, so that they can interact with one another, interact with instructors, interact with the content that is being taught in a very democratic way,” Roy said.

100,000 posts a day

While Yellowdig was initially founded in 2015, it had a major relaunch in early 2020, just as the pandemic was forcing education institutions to change the way they did everything.

“Technology is being adopted at a rapid pace right now, which wasn’t the case before the pandemic,” Roy said. “We literally restarted the company in 2020, almost,” Roy said. “And now we have, almost on a daily basis, over 100,000 posts and comments on our platform.”

Of those posts, he said, 90% are from students. Instructors participate, too, sometimes offering prompts for discussion or other guiding input.  

More recently, Yellowdig released an app allowing students to stay interactive on mobile.

The students connect with Yellowdig, a B2B2C (that’s business-to-business-to-consumer) company, through approximately 200 learning institutions that are the company’s main clients, including Harvard University, Clark Atlanta University and Clemson University. Individual departments and faculty can also partner with Yellowdig, as can bookstores, which can provide direct access to textbooks through the platform.

Yellowdig considers itself an early adopter of AI, with the technology used throughout the platform to summarize discussions, monitor for toxic behavior and help spot students who may be in need of mental health intervention.

“The way I look at it is, our platform is driving what we value, human event interaction, as much as possible, and we are building AI frameworks to make that very seamless and easy,” Roy said. “We don’t believe that humans should interact with AI necessarily.”

Growth and future vision

Early on, Yellowdig was accepted into the West Coast accelerator 500 Startups (now 500 Global) and landed its first check. 

After that, the company raised funding locally, including from SRI Capital and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, which helped see Yellowdig through its replatforming in 2020.  

In all, Yellowdig has raised $6.84 million, according to PitchBook. In 2018, Yellowdig raised at a valuation of $7.8 million, but “we’ve raised at higher valuations since then,” according to Holly Owens, a marketing professional for the company. The company did not disclose its current valuation.

“One of the benefits of education is that there are lots of people who really want to see education evolve and change and modernize,” Roy said. “We were lucky enough to meet a lot of investors, entrepreneurs who have been really passionate about it.”

In the next five years, Roy hopes to see Yellowdig reach 1,000 colleges and universities while continuing to leverage AI and other tools to help it scale — despite the challenges that face education technologies in the 2020s, including a school of thought that suggests that AI will replace education altogether.

“A lot of people think that education cannot be changed, because these universities have been around for such a long time,” said Roy. “We are trying to change that narrative, to say it can be changed, and it could be better, and universities and colleges don’t have to go away.”