At the world’s biggest AI summit, a startup from Ahmedabad walked in with a solution that 300 million students and their exhausted teachers have been waiting for. And it goes far deeper than just grading.
Walk into any school staffroom in India the week after exams and you will find the same scene, unchanged for generations. Stacks of handwritten answer sheets piled on every desk. Teachers hunched over papers late into the night, red pen in hand, moving through hundreds of copies one by one. It is slow, exhausting, deeply human work. And in a country where hundreds of millions of exams are conducted every single year, across thousands of schools, universities, and government institutes, it has always been this way.
Until now.
The Summit That Raised the Stakes
On February 16, 2026, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the India AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi, the first global AI gathering ever hosted in the Global South. Over 20 Heads of State, 60 ministers, Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and 500 global AI leaders gathered under one roof to answer a defining question: what does AI actually do for people?
Among 300+ exhibitors, one startup quietly stood out.
The Startup
GradeLab, founded in Ahmedabad by Akshat Shah, Jainil Padmani, and Om Joshi, has built what the education world kept waiting for but never quite got: an AI system that reads handwritten answer sheets, understands them, grades them against teacher-set rubrics, and returns a detailed, auditable result ready for the teacher to review and approve simply.
Not a chatbot. Not another EdTech wrapper. A real solution to a real, problem
Beyond Grading Intelligence That Transforms Teaching
Here is where gradelab.io goes further than any grading tool before it. Once the AI grades, it does not stop. It thinks.
For every student, GradeLab generates a detailed SWOT analysis that maps individual Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats across subjects and topics. A student who consistently scores well on theory but struggles with application-based questions gets a profile that captures exactly that. A student showing declining performance across consecutive tests gets flagged before the teacher even notices the trend.
A department head in a university can now see, at a glance, which topics across three hundred students in a semester are consistently misunderstood. Not after the year-end results, but mid-semester, while there is still time to act. A school principal can identify which classes are underperforming in mathematics and trace it back to a specific chapter or teaching gap within days of an assessment.
Built for Bharat, Not Just the IITs
GradeLab’s mission is to bring all of this, including AI grading, student SWOT profiles, learning graphs, class analytics, department dashboards, and curriculum intelligence, to every school, every university, and every government institute across India. From the IITs of Mumbai to the district colleges of rural Bihar. From competitive entrance exam bodies to state board assessment institutions.
A student at a district college in Jharkhand deserves the same depth of feedback and the same quality of insight as a student at a top institution in Delhi. With GradeLab, that is no longer an aspiration. It is a product feature.
The Real Impact
India AI Impact Summit 2026 was full of grand visions for what AI could do for the world.
GradeLab showed up with something rarer a direct answer to a problem affecting hundreds of millions of people right now, and a system that makes every exam not just a test but a detailed intelligence report on how an entire generation is learning.
The teacher sitting alone with 200 answer sheets on a Sunday night is not a footnote in India’s development story. She is the story. When she gets her Sunday back and gets a dashboard that tells her exactly where each student, each class, and each department stands, something real changes. Not in a press release. In a classroom.
That is exactly the kind of AI impact India needed most.
For more information, visit: https://gradelab.io/
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