Founder's Interview

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How long have you been working with this product?
I’ve been working on this project for five years. The Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Russia launched a project to create a national online learning platform for leading universities to post their lectures and provide an opportunity to take credit courses in 2015. Everything was close to perfect, except it was unclear how to identify students and trust the distance exam results.
We looked through existing solutions, mainly from the United States, and found out that they mostly used old technologies and were too expensive for developing markets. So, I decided to build a team and create a proctoring solution based on modern AI and computer vision approaches that would be flexible and cost-effective for developing countries.
Now it’s evident that these requirements are also relevant for the clients from the United States and Europe.

What is the most exciting thing about your job?
I interact with clients and partners from different countries and see how regional differences affect the needs and ways of doing business. It’s a very complicated and exciting task to determine the product’s development strategy in particular and Examus in general to ensure it meets the most market needs (although sometimes these two goals contradict each other). The vision of building a large international company inspires me, as does the possibility of developing a solution that becomes the quality standard in AI proctoring.

Are there any ideological principles that your organization follows to maintain the brand value?

It has always been from the very beginning that the main principle of our company is to examine our customers’ needs profoundly and then suggest the most efficient and flexible solution. If necessary, we adapt our solution for specific cases and rarely say that something is impossible to do.
The second principle is to provide the best possible service. Technical problems during exams seem like disasters, and they make students nervous. They call the university, and the teachers get worried, too. So, our goal is to minimize the students’ stress; therefore, teachers receive the exam results and not the problems.

Considering the pace at which the SaaS market is growing, how important is it to keep innovating to stay in the game?

To compete successfully in any IT segment and on the online proctoring market in particular, it’s necessary to apply modern approaches and respond to requests promptly. And it’s not just about innovations in technical solutions. For example, now we use three different business models for different regions, which we have developed over the past six months. And, of course, technological innovation is essential. In 2020, we completely upgraded our automatic algorithms, and, for some of them, we applied for patents.

What is one thing that puts your product apart from the crowd?

At first, we focused on providing a high-quality proctoring service. But pretty soon we realized that this is not enough, since we can’t grow as fast as we expected. Some clients, especially enterprises, also didn’t need a ready-to-use service. They were looking for an effective and flexible solution to monitor hundreds and millions of exams for an affordable cost.
In 2019, we set ourselves to develop a solution that would automate the online proctoring processes completely, including the integration with the testing system, providing the student with a convenient way to sign up for an exam and experience a transparent testing process. In this model, the student should not have any discomfort while switching from testing to a proctoring system and vice versa. The customer’s administrators and teachers can solve all problems by themselves without our assistance. It should be based on the best algorithms for the automatic analysis of student behavior. We completed it by early 2020 and presented our new solution at Bett in London in January 2020 and at the Microsoft Global Education Partner Summit in Seattle in February 2020. Now, large corporations, Ministries of Education, and leading universities can use our solution to make their proctoring centers while considering their region and country’s safety requirements. Additionally, testing and training systems can include our technology in their solution as an extra module to provide AI proctoring.

How would you define “a successful product”?
A successful product is one that sells well and leaves customers and users satisfied.

What exciting event is coming up from your side in 2020?
We’ve just updated our AI algorithms, so the accuracy of automatic cheating detection is increased by at least 20%. Moreover, we’ve released a proctoring solution for oral exams, which is our unique development.

What helps you stay updated, interested, and inspired?
I am inspired by our clients’ success stories and their gratitude. Last month, for example, we helped students enroll in a university in Peru under total quarantine conditions. It wasn’t easy since the students were taking the online exams and working with the proctoring system for the first time, and, of course, there were technical issues. Our team worked all night due to the time zone difference but managed to help everyone. As a result, the university was happy with the way the online examination process was carried out, and the students were able to pass the entrance exams.

Author Bio
Dmitry Istomin, Examus founder and CEO.

Dmitry launched Examus in 2015. Since 2003, he has been steadily evolving from IT engineer and IT solutions sales manager to online education project manager. From 2011 to 2015, he was VP BD of a large IT integrator. During this time, he founded two startups and made a successful exit.
In 2018, Dmitry Istomin studied at the University of Berkeley, and Examus was accelerated by SkyDeck Berkeley accelerator. Since then, Examus proctoring started its penetration into the global market. As for 2020, Examus proctoring has multiplied its clients worldwide and is growing rapidly alongside all digital technologies and the online education market.

Examus team

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