Plato
Dragos Popa
Dragos Popa's Story
Dragos Popa, who studied a BSc Computer Science at the University of Leeds, co-founded Plato during his third year with help from Spark. Dragos and co-founder Nikita Dumitriuc have recently managed to secure £260,000 funding to propel their AI study assistant business.
Plato is an embedded, governed AI study assistant that integrates directly within module materials. The AI is embedded within programmes at universities to answer academic queries within the module. This enables more personal support, aligned to the course content, for students.
"I've always had entrepreneurial drive, I wanted to create something for myself and always enjoyed building things, which is why I chose to do computer science here at Leeds."
The AI assistant also helps institutions gain structured analytics on usage, engagement and learning behaviour, giving them unique insight and understanding to student queries within modules.
Dragos moved to the UK from Romania in 2012, where at school he met his now co-founder, Nikita Dumitriuc.
"I was on the lookout for incubators and accelerators, and I started doing projects in my first couple of years here at Leeds, with Spark. Although they weren't successful, Spark really helped support me and understand that failure is a part of the process."
Whilst studying at Leeds, Dragos saw large language AI models becoming more popular and he started to develop a prototype for the business which he pitched to staff in the School of Computing and secured some funding for security testing and student engagement.
At the Digital Universities UK conference 2024 held in Exeter, the business secured a pilot with the University of Sussex. Plato has since gone from strength to strength with a trial at the University of Liverpool which received good feedback.
The funding from SFC Capital will help to further develop analytics and reporting capabilities within the tool app, alongside strengthening governance, compliance and customisation features.
"The Spark team really helped our business during this time with office space at Nexus, advice and mentorship. Being an enterprise scholar in my first year and the financial support from the grants Plato received, have got us this far. The business is now in a place to raise finance because of Spark. If it wasn't for Spark, we wouldn't have been based here in Leeds."
