Vidi by Turn the Bus

Our solution addresses the pervasive issue of progressive learning gaps among school-aged children, particularly in economically disadvantaged communities 

In Bihar, India, where Turn the Bus currently operates,  only 77% of 17-18-year-olds possess basic reading skills and even fewer are proficient in arithmetic and English. 

One of the primary challenges many students face is the absence of qualified teachers/tutors to answer their questions. Many students also suffer from sequential learning gaps, i.e. they lack a fundamental understanding of core concepts, leading to a compounding effect on their academic performance. 

This issue underscores the critical need for personalized and engaging educational solutions.

The good news is that personalized learning works! Rigorous studies have shown significant and persistent improvements in language and math learning levels, particularly among students with the lowest initial learning baselines, by complementing traditional classroom instruction with targeted interventions that leverage personalized teaching pedagogies. As an example, one can look at Pratham’s TaRL (Teaching at the Right Level) program in India (validated by a  J PAL study). 

Such evidence-based studies point to a dire need for a personalized progressive learning approach to mitigate learning gaps and cater to individual student needs. Scalable progressive learning tools need to be implemented in a way that delivers impactful learning experiences and enables marginalized students to excel academically.  

The scale of the problem is immense. In Bihar, there is a population of over 100 Million people, with an average literacy rate of 69.83%. Each year, 2 Million students appear for the 10th grade high school Board exams. The problem of the learning gap in teenagers exists across various parts of the developing world, and also in high school students in disadvantaged communities in the developed countries.

Given the current shortage of qualified teachers and infrastructure in many high schools, the only scalable and realistic way in which personalized learning experiences can be delivered to these students is through an online, always-available, ethics-first set of progressive learning assistants that help them get answers to curricula-related questions, get help with lab work and homework, interactively prepare for exams,  and get career counseling and coaching. 

It is fair to ask whether personalized progressive learning can be conducted by technology rather than in-person teaching. Outcomes from  J PAL India’s study on Delhi schools using personalized learning technology provide a positive answer to that question, demonstrating an improvement of 2x in mathematics and 2.4x in language skills, with weakest students showing the greatest improvement. In other words, technology can be an ally to address this problem. At Turn the Bus, we believe that Generative AI can make it more human-like and potentially offers a better solution.

Our solution, Vidi, is a set of ethics-first generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) based progressive  Learning Assistants for students aged 14-25 that help them answer curricula-related questions, get help with lab work and homework, interactively prepare for exams,  and get career counseling and coaching.

By offering on-demand support and guidance, Vidi will enable students to resolve doubts and clarify concepts conversationally using the free Turn the Bus app, effectively bridging gaps in their understanding and fostering a deeper comprehension of key subject matter. Additionally, students will use Vidi assistants for homework, lab work support, examination preparation, and career counseling. 

The rapid advancements in Generative AI (GenAI) and Statistical Learning Technologies offer a more human-like tutor/ progressive learning assistant option.  Our solution, Vidi, leverages GenAI technologies. Gen AI has brought about a range of ethical challenges that all solutions must carefully navigate. We note that Narrow AI solutions have no agency and do not make ethical decisions. Designers knowingly or unknowingly do make ethical decisions. Ethical behavior of an AI-based solution can only be achieved by ensuring that responsible choices are made at every stage in the development of a solution (ideation, design, development, deployment, and use). 

Vidi prioritizes ethical considerations through defined ethics policies, ensuring fairness, transparency, privacy, safety, accountability, and intellectual property rights. By adhering to these principles, Vidi enhances the learning experience and safeguards students' well-being and rights. For example, when asked for homework support, Vidi will provide progressive hints for the student to figure out how to solve the problem. However, it will neither provide a direct answer nor regurgitate other homework responses, enabling plagiarism. 

Being a nonprofit, we are designing Vidi to have ethical outcomes using this "ethics-first" approach. Our Head of Innovation, Dr. Tilak Agerwala is one of the early advocates of Ethics in AI. Deployed through the Turn the Bus Android App, which already boasts a user base of over 300,000 students, Vidi will provide adaptive, personalized, progressive learning assistance to cater to each learner’s needs and goals. 

With the prevalence of smartphones in rural communities in Bihar, where 87% of 17- to 18-year-olds have access to smartphones at home, Vidi will reach many disadvantaged students and potentially significantly impact education in Bihar and beyond. By providing a free alternative to traditional coaching classes and personal tutors that are out of reach of marginalized students, Vidi will democratize access to high-quality educational resources and has the potential to revolutionize the learning landscape, empowering economically disadvantaged students to achieve academic success and realize their full potential.

Turn The Bus provides a free Android app (based on Open edX)  to over 300,000 high school students in economically disadvantaged areas in the state of Bihar (India). 

Our students use the app to access educational video content and quizzes to supplement education received in high school. 

From a technographic perspective, our students are the early adopters of smartphones and internet technology in their communities, and they share a keen interest in leveraging digital resources for educational advancement. 

Psychologically, they harbor hopes for a brighter future, viewing education as a pathway to success and socioeconomic mobility. 

They come from families that earn $100-200 a month.

One of the biggest blockers to that goal are persistent knowledge and learning gaps due to inadequate educational infrastructure:  we see a high demand for personalized learning support to address these gaps from our students. These narratives from our students bolster the evidence-based studies outlined in our response to the prior question.

Vidi, our solution, is envisioned to serve students aged 14 to 25 in economically disadvantaged areas who experience these learning gaps in key subjects like mathematics, science, and languages. 

Through Vidi (personalized ethics-first progressive learning assistants), we aim to empower these young learners to overcome conceptual learning gaps and unlock their full educational potential. 

Vidi's chat-based artificial intelligence assistants (delivered through the free Turn The Bus android app) will be a transformative tool for these students, offering real-time dynamic assistance to address their questions, resolve doubts, and bridge sequential learning gaps. 

Unlike traditional study materials and video-based content, Vidi will adapt to each student's unique needs, current achievement level and learning style, enabling deep conceptual understanding and promoting cognitive learning instead of rote memorization.

Once students have resolved conceptual gaps, they will use Vidi assistants for homework, lab, and examination preparation assistance, laying a solid foundation for improved academic performance. As the student is graduating high school, a Vidi assistant will offer counseling on future career prospects and options. 

By equipping these young learners with essential problem-solving skills, a robust educational background, and a personalized career path, we aim to empower them to contribute positively to their communities and economies.

In summary, Vidi is a critical enabler of our mission to reduce income inequality sustainably by reducing educational inequality with the help of smartphones.

Turn the Bus is a nonprofit organization with a scalable, digital-first, design intensive business model.. Over the last five years, we have assembled a team of active technology and strategy leaders who volunteer with us for between 4 and 15 hours every week. Some key leaders include Dr. Tilak Agerwala, Subhajit Bhattacherjee, Murali Balasubramanian, Mani Krishnan, Dr. Makarand Phadke, Rahul Deshpande, Nikhil Ojha, Lijo George and Gagandeep Singh. 

Our leaders have deep industry, innovation, and technology delivery experience, having worked in leadership roles at Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Accenture, Salesforce, Bain and other leading companies. 

We have a strong track record of delivering technology products using agile processes: our mobile app and associated video content are used by over 300K students in Bihar, India, and we continue to enhance the app with new features requested by students. 

Beyond our core of volunteer leadership, content developers, and programmers, we also work with academic institutions like Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the USA and the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIM-C), BITS Pilani and other Indian universities  to sponsor  student team projects that we roll into product enhancements (with the agreement of the associated institution).  

We also work as close partners with excellent field organizations like Jeevika, who help us design relevant programs and expand our reach into our target communities exponentially. 

Leveraging our deep technical skills, partnerships and program delivery expertise, we have developed a robust architecture and a realistic plan to deliver Vidi through prototypes, minimally viable product (MVP) iterations, user pilots, A/B testing scenarios, and releases.  Deeply embedded in our engineering process is our ability to seek student feedback for prototypes and early MVPs and tune our product based on feedback to be well aware of our students' needs. This ensures that our products are well-positioned to serve these needs ethically. 

We have chosen the prototyping stage for our progressive learning suite of assistants, Vidi. 

Vidi, our progressive learning suite, is in the early stages of product development and has made notable progress. We've recruited talented volunteer engineers to create research prototypes (see example), starting with open-source large language models. 

These prototypes are being refined to cater to our students’ specific curricula and ensure ethical responses to student queries. We're actively testing various approaches, including different ethics policies and AI model training methods, to enhance Vidi's effectiveness and ethics compliance.

Currently, our focus is on iterative design and development of prototypes for Vidi, with an emphasis on accuracy and ethical compliance. Initial prototypes have centered on training models on the high school curriculum mandated by the government of Bihar, India, and providing responses based solely on that curriculum. We're also working on accurate problem-solving in physics and math, minimizing errors and ensuring model reliability.

Our commitment to ethical considerations and quality assurance means we will continue the prototyping stage for at least the next nine months. As a nonprofit organization driven by social and educational value maximization, we prioritize the welfare of disadvantaged students over rushing to market with a minimally viable product. Therefore, we will start student piloting only when we are confident that the responses from our prototypes have high levels of accuracy and ethics policy compliance.

Turn the Bus app is in the growth stage and has already made significant strides, serving over 300,000 students in Bihar, India. 

It offers accessible educational content, and also addresses learning gaps through other ongoing pilot programs and direct feedback from students. Additionally, we've collaborated with the METALS program at Carnegie Mellon University to develop a virtual lab simulator, scheduled for implementation by August 2024. This collaboration aims to bridge STEM learning gaps, a critical area for many students.

Overall, our accomplishments include serving a significant number of students through the Turn the Bus app, establishing partnerships for STEM learning initiatives, and making substantial progress in the development and testing of Vidi. These achievements demonstrate our dedication to providing accessible and high-quality education to socio-economically disadvantaged students in Bihar, India, and beyond. Scalability is built into our DNA as a digital nonprofit organization.

The opportunity to be selected to be a Solve participant would be a dream come true for us. We are applying to Solve because we recognize Vidi and Turn the Bus's significant challenges in scaling globally. 

As we strive to leverage digital and AI technologies to enhance educational outcomes across multiple geographies, we must navigate cultural, linguistic, regional and curricular differences in our personalized progressive learning assistants. Ensuring fairness, transparency, privacy, student safety, accountability, and ethical IP rights is paramount as we push the boundaries of innovation in these areas.

Participating in Solve will provide us access to a valuable network of peers and advisors who can advise us on technical, ethical, geographical and scaling related challenges we encounter. Additionally, as a not-for-profit organization currently operating in communities in India, access to in-kind resources like software licenses, legal services, and potentially enabling technologies such as smartphones would greatly enhance our operational reach and efficiency.

Furthermore, we are exploring avenues to create a for-profit subsidiary in economically developed markets within the construct of our not-for-profit parent organization in the USA. Solve's 9-month virtual support program will facilitate this restructuring, allowing us to engage with a network of global innovation, finance, entrepreneurship, and legal experts. 

We are eager to explore ideas to convert Vidi from a set of assistants into a for-profit/hybrid product that can be monetized in more affluent segments of students, which can then support further product development to help the disadvantaged students who remain our core mission. We firmly believe that the gaps in conceptual understanding exist even in more affluent student groups and that leveraging the power of Vidi to bridge these gaps can be a commercially viable proposition.

Demonstrating our ability to improve educational outcomes is a multifaceted task, and we would greatly benefit from metrics driven monitoring and evaluation support from Solve to measure our impact effectively and evaluate alternative paths/roadmaps to the solution. Through Solve, we seek funding, resources, strategic guidance, and partnerships to advance our mission of providing accessible and high-quality education to students worldwide.

Our solution, Vidi, introduces transformative personalized progressive learning technology to address persistent learning gaps in economically disadvantaged students aged 14 to 25. What sets Vidi apart is its innovative approach, which leverages an ethics-first framework, scalability, cost-effective accessibility, and personalized assistance to catalyze broader positive impacts in the education space.

1. Ethics-First Approach: Vidi prioritizes ethical design principles throughout its development and implementation. By integrating Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) techniques and Progressive Learning methodologies, we ensure that our solution not only enhances learning outcomes but also upholds user privacy and rights. This approach builds trust and confidence among users while maximizing the positive impact on their educational experiences.

2. Global Scalability: Designed with scalability in mind, Vidi adopts scalable processes and infrastructure to extend its reach beyond current target communities. By leveraging AI technology and delivering content in students' native languages, Vidi ensures inclusivity and accessibility for all learners worldwide. This scalability enables Vidi to make a meaningful difference on a global scale, potentially transforming education for millions of disadvantaged students globally.

3. Cost-Effective Accessibility: Vidi prioritizes delivering cost-effective educational support through smartphones, making it accessible to a large, diverse, marginalized population. By leveraging the widespread availability of AI technology, Vidi democratizes access to progressive learning, enabling students who may not have access to traditional educational resources due to economic constraints or geographic limitations. This approach has the potential to revolutionize education accessibility and equity on a global scale.

4. Personalized Progressive Learning: Unlike traditional study materials and tutoring services, Vidi offers personalized, dynamic assistance tailored to each student's unique needs and learning styles. By adapting to individual proficiency levels and addressing specific knowledge gaps, Vidi empowers students to achieve deep conceptual understanding and cognitive learning, ultimately better preparing them for examinations and future careers.

Vidi's innovative approach has the potential to catalyze broader positive impacts in the education space by setting new standards for ethical AI-driven education solutions, fostering inclusivity and accessibility, and revolutionizing the learning experience for millions of disadvantaged students globally.

In the broader market landscape, Vidi could change the game by reducing the need for traditional tutoring services and improving school efficacy ratings. By providing personalized support and tracking student improvement metrics, Vidi would empower teachers to better address individual learning needs and ensure that no child is left behind. This could lead to significant improvements in standardized testing outcomes and overall student performance, benefiting students, teachers, and schools alike.

Furthermore, Vidi's ability to prepare students for life ahead by assisting with homework, lab work, standardized exams, and career choices fills a crucial gap in the current education system, particularly for socio-economically disadvantaged students. By offering always-available interactive learning assistance, Vidi democratizes access to progressive education, empowering students to succeed academically and pursue their dreams regardless of their background or circumstances.

Our solution, Vidi, is like having a smart friend who can help you understand your school work better. Here's how and why we expect Vidi to make a big difference:

1. Addressing a Big Need: Many students struggle because they lack qualified teachers to help them with their questions and problems. Vidi fills this gap by providing instant help whenever students need it, right on their smartphones.

2. Backed by Research: Studies have shown that personalized teaching methods can help struggling students. Vidi uses smart technology to personalize the learning experience for each student, making it easier for them to understand and learn.

3. Integrated with Turn the Bus: Vidi is part of the Turn the Bus app, which has already reached thousands of students with their studies. 

4. Strong Partnerships: We have partnered with organizations like Jeevika, which supports millions of women in Bihar, India. This partnership helps us reach more students and make a bigger difference in their lives.

5. Accessible Technology: Smartphones are everywhere in India, even in rural areas. Vidi leverages this widespread access to technology to help students no matter where they live.

Our Theory of Change for Vidi is as follows: 

a)    Activities / Throughput – Design, test and scale ‘Vidi’ as an ethics AI learning assistant

b)    Output – “Vidi” Version 1 that works in Hindi for the state of Bihar and which is used by at least 1,000 students in the first 12 months (starting in 2025). The measures would be on defining “types of queries”, “nature of conceptual clarity required”, and how Vidi enables this learning ethically

c)     Outcome – Define a shift from current learning style (by rote / gaps) into new learning styles that build foundational knowledge

d)    Impact – build confidence, versatility, and agency that impacts the career path choices including livelihood solutions, entrepreneurship

We can make a real difference in students' lives with Vidi, helping them succeed in school and beyond.

The impact goals outlined for Vidi encompass a comprehensive approach to addressing key educational challenges, ranging from ethical considerations to enhancing learning experiences and increasing accessibility to educational resources. These goals are ambitious and essential for creating a meaningful and impactful solution in the educational technology (EdTech) space.

First and foremost, Vidi aims to respond ethically by prioritizing fairness and non-discrimination, transparency and explainability, privacy, relevance and accuracy, and intellectual property rights. To achieve this, the team behind Vidi plans to establish clear ethics guidelines, ensure ethical behavior by design, and continuously monitor and evaluate adherence to these principles. This commitment to ethical practices is crucial in fostering trust among users and stakeholders, as well as upholding the integrity of the educational environment.

The second goal focuses on enhancing the learning experience by providing personalized and accurate responses tailored to individual needs. This approach has the potential to significantly improve comprehension, retention, and engagement among learners, particularly in environments where qualified teachers may be scarce. By leveraging technology to deliver tailored educational content, Vidi aims to empower learners and facilitate self-directed learning, bridging gaps in access to quality education.

Increasing accessibility to educational resources is another critical aspect of Vidi's impact goals. By offering instant and scalable support for learners, Vidi seeks to remove educational barriers for individuals in remote areas or with limited access to traditional educational services. This commitment to inclusivity aligns with broader efforts to promote equal learning opportunities and address disparities in educational attainment.

Additionally, Vidi aims to streamline the knowledge transfer process by enabling quick and effective query responses. By leveraging technology to facilitate efficient communication between learners and educational content, Vidi can help save time for learners and create a more productive learning environment. This emphasis on efficiency underscores Vidi's commitment to maximizing the value of learners' time and resources.

To measure progress towards these impact goals, Vidi plans to employ a range of metrics across four key areas: engagement, accuracy and relevance, accessibility, and efficiency. These metrics will provide valuable insights into user interaction, the quality of responses generated by Vidi, the solution's reach, and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. By systematically tracking these metrics, Vidi can assess its impact, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize its performance.

Looking ahead, Vidi has set a stretch goal to drive innovation in EdTech and democratize education globally within 5 to 10 years. This ambitious objective underscores Vidi's commitment to advancing educational technology and making education more accessible and inclusive globally. Vidi will track adoption rates, gather stakeholder feedback, and compare its impact with traditional learning methods to measure progress towards this stretch goal.

In summary, the impact goals outlined for Vidi reflect a holistic approach to addressing key educational challenges through ethical responsiveness, personalized learning experiences, increased accessibility, and streamlined knowledge transfer. By leveraging technology and data-driven insights, Vidi aims to make a meaningful and lasting impact on education locally and globally.

Vidi is a set of progressive learning assistants that students can interact with for personalized progressive learning assistance. This is delivered through the existing Turn The Bus Android application, which is a mobile application written in Java using Android APIs for the front end, and leveraging a microservices based web architecture deployed on Amazon Web Services EC2 virtual machines to manage student sessions/interaction and uses Amazon S3 to store video content. Vidi itself is a separate microservices architecture deployed on Amazon EC2 VMs  where student chat input is sent over a web based API implemented in Python that scans the request to make sure it is ethical and benevolent, and sends it to a set of open source large language models (like Llama-2, Mistral, … specifically trained for Vidi). The response from each model is reviewed for ethics, benevolence and relevance, and the response with the highest relevance score that passes ethics checks is sent to the student. We have a separate model training infrastructure that is offline, and uses existing model performance data and other metrics to progressively refine our models. The entire Vidi backend is written in Python using pytorch, langchain, and other open source libraries.

The core Turn the Bus app operates with one full-time staff member, seven part-time senior leaders, and all volunteers bringing elite professional backgrounds. 

Complementing this team are ten part-time contractors handling project execution. Additionally, over 300 volunteers on Slack contribute periodically, enriching the collaborative environment. 

Within Turn the Bus, Vidi is led by a part-time senior leader and supported by a team of four volunteer tech experts. This organizational structure optimizes expertise while leveraging a mix of volunteer and contracted support for efficient operations and impactful outcomes.

Turn the Bus was founded in 2018, with a mission to reduce income inequality sustainably by reducing educational inequality with the help of smartphones. 

The core Turn the Bus Android app (based on Open edX) now delivers education to 300,000+ high school students via videos, quizzes and notes. 

In Oct 2023, we kicked off Vidi as both a program and a product to focus on ethically using genAI to solve persistent learning gaps. We are currently in the research prototype stage as outlined in an earlier response. 

Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is deeply ingrained in the fabric of our organization. Led by a woman of color, our US-based senior leadership team boasts decades of experience collaborating with diverse global teams spanning ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities. What truly matters to us are our team members' skills, experience, and dedication, ensuring a culture of meritocracy and inclusivity.

About 80% of our volunteer team of over 300 people are people of color, specifically people of Indian origin. We are like a tech company in that we are headquartered in the US but global in our operations. For our initial pilot, the students are from the state of Bihar, India, so our educational content is delivered in Hindi. Therefore our content creators for the pilot are 90%+ Hindi speaking folks of Indian origin. As we expand to other geographies, we will work with a diverse set of subject matter experts who will be representative of students in every geography that we operate in. Additionally, in areas outside of content creation (like product management and engineering), we have volunteers from various countries like the USA, Mexico and Singapore in addition to India.

We actively seek feedback from diverse stakeholders, including students, educators, and community leaders, fostering an environment where every voice is welcomed, respected, and valued to improve our programs and initiatives continuously. By engaging with a wide range of voices, we ensure our solutions are tailored to address the unique needs and challenges of every individual we serve. Through ongoing dialogue and collaboration, we strive to create a more inclusive and equitable educational ecosystem where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. Our team values emphasize empathy, understanding, and a sincere commitment to giving back to our community.

Additionally, our dedication to equity and inclusion extends to our beneficiaries regardless of age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity. We believe in empowering all individuals with equal opportunities and resources to succeed. For instance, we design content in Hindi to ensure accessibility for underprivileged students and focus our outreach efforts exclusively on rural and marginalized communities. In our pursuit of inclusivity, we recognize the importance of motivation and empowerment for our students. We aim to inspire and uplift every individual we serve by fostering a sense of belonging and equality. After all, education and tools like Vidi hold profound meaning only when students feel valued, motivated, and empowered to reach their full potential.

Furthermore, we are committed to fostering diversity within our leadership team and across all levels of our organization. We actively recruit and mentor individuals from underrepresented backgrounds, providing them with professional growth and advancement opportunities. By cultivating a diverse talent pool, we enrich our team with varied perspectives and experiences, enabling us to innovate and adapt more effectively to our complex challenges.

Operating as a digital-first nonprofit organization, our mission is to reduce income inequality sustainably by reducing educational inequality with the help of smartphones. 

Our primary tool in achieving our mission is our B2C Android app, which has enrolled 300,000 students in rural Bihar over the last five years. To ensure absolute fit with what the students need, we create content based on their High School Board exam curriculum (Bihar School Examination Board)  at the 10th grade and 12th grade level in their local language (Hindi). 

To reach 14-25 year old students, we establish partnerships with various field nonprofit organizations, with a notable collaboration being our close alliance with the government-affiliated and World Bank-funded Jeevika. Jeevika is a part of the Rural Development department; thus our edtech solutions are supplementary to the efforts of the Education Department and are designed to work directly with the community. 

Through our partnership with Jeevika, we gain access to their extensive rural network of 13 million women, allowing us to reach their children who are more digitally-savvy and can use smartphone based education to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

This collaboration significantly streamlines our outreach efforts, enabling us to conduct efficient enrollment campaigns aimed at high school students preparing for board exams. Leveraging Jeevika's existing infrastructure, these campaigns typically span a few weeks and result in the enrollment of over 100,000 students each year. 

Our simple call to action prompts students to download our mobile app onto their Android devices, facilitating access to educational resources tailored to their needs.

Beyond our collaboration with Jeevika, we actively seek partnerships with other NGOs to further digitize relevant education. 

Moving forward, our primary challenge revolves around continually creating pertinent content and programs that resonate with our target demographic, while simultaneously enhancing engagement levels. Once our students clear their Board exams, we seek to keep them engaged with career oriented content. 

In summary, while our primary interface with our students is B2C, our operational model relies heavily on strategic partnerships with government and nonprofit entities to facilitate access to our target audience. By leveraging these collaborations, we can effectively extend the reach of our initiatives and work towards our overarching mission of reducing educational inequality. This multifaceted approach allows us to harness the collective resources and expertise of various stakeholders, driving meaningful impact and sustainable change in the communities we serve.

A key component of our strategy involves maintaining open lines of communication with our audience (via app-based notifications and feedback loops), ensuring that their voices are heard and their evolving needs are addressed.

To ensure financial sustainability for Turn the Bus, our plan leverages our considerable strengths while opening up new revenue streams that we will need to fund development of the generative AI components for Vidi. 

Our model has proved to be  highly successful in attracting top-tier professionals who volunteer their time. With over 20 professionals in different leadership positions volunteering at least 10 hours/week, we have a proven track record of long-term, lasting leadership. The use of digital workspaces and collaboration tools enables remote volunteering, helping us recruit leaders who would otherwise be inaccessible to us. Our leadership model has been our core strength over the past five years, and we will continue to use this leadership model for Vidi.

Turn the Bus is a 501 c (3) nonprofit organization, and we have also had access to a network of IITians and IIM alumni in the USA (top engineering and business schools in India) The alumni generously donate their time (worth hundreds of dollars an hour) Those who do not have time to spare have given money generously as well. Major donors have given $25,000 at one time, or $10,000 each year over multiple years. This, combined with frugal cash flow management has resulted in a sustained cash balance of over $50,000 over the past few years for Turn the Bus. 

Having said that, we do have a challenge in funding generative AI development only through volunteers. Recognizing this, we are working on a model creating a for-profit subsidiary or business unit of Turn the Bus. This subsidiary will license Vidi to for-profit education services providers or school districts, and the licensing revenue will be used for further Vidi product development. For this we would need to build access to markets outside India - our architecture is designed in a way to ensure portability to other languages and LLM training data. 

We will be seeking seed funding from angel investors, grantmaking organizations and venture capitalists to kickstart the for-profit subsidiary. Some members of our leadership team are serial entrepreneurs and have experience in the incubator, angel investment and venture capital space. This model will provide financial sustainability for Vidi, while ensuring accessibility to our programs for socio-economically disadvantaged students.

The for-profit subsidiary backed by venture capital presents an opportunity to secure upfront funding necessary to achieve our goals and ensure the success of our students. We are actively working with accountants and lawyers to determine the most suitable corporate structure for this venture, balancing financial sustainability with our non-profit mission.

While we will create a for-profit subsidiary, this will purely be to fund development of Vidi. We are committed to the core mission of Turn the Bus (the parent organization) which will remain a non-profit and continue to focus on reducing income inequality sustainably by reducing educational inequality with the help of smartphones in the developing world.