Can technology tackle the global literacy problem?

London, November 13, 2017 – 13 companies around the world are selected by UK based global education publisher Pearson and the US-based venture capitalist The Unreasonable Group to combat the worldwide problem of low literacy. Among this select group of companies is Wizenoze, an Artificial Intelligence company specializing in readability. Wizenoze’s scalable machine learning technology has the potential to help tackle this worldwide problem.

Project Literacy Lab
Project Literacy Lab, supported by Pearson and The Unreasonable Group, is the world’s first accelerator for entrepreneurs focused on closing the global literacy gap. Pearson selected a group of 13 groundbreaking ventures from around the world to solve the problem of low literacy. The Project Literacy Lab is part of the broader Project Literacy campaign, which aims to build a grassroots movement and drive targeted action towards achieving universal literacy by 2030. Illiteracy is a global problem. It affects more than 750 million human lives – one in ten people living today. It costs the world $1.19 trillion a year.
Wizenoze
Wizenoze, an AI company based in Amsterdam and London, helps to close the global literacy gap by improving the readability of published material and by improving discoverability of content matched to reading ability. At Wizenoze everyone is committed to making the lives of millions of people better, by giving them access to information they can read and understand.
10-day program
An extensive selection was made to participate in the program, with a focus on the scalability of the technology and the current success of the company. Participating companies must all be able to become a global player in the short term. The 10-day accelerator will take place in Connecticut, USA in November and will bring together the 13 for-profit ventures and over 50 mentors who will help these talented entrepreneurs solve their business challenges by exposing them to new approaches and insights. The companies will be presented to customers and investors.
Daniel Epstein, founder and CEO of Unreasonable Group about Project Literacy Lab: “Many of these entrepreneurs are already measurably closing the global literacy gap with technologies we didn’t know existed – profitably. Unlike most accelerator programs, we are choosing to align with solutions that have already proven to be effective in market. Now, we’re helping these entrepreneurs scale their ventures across countries and continents to impact hundreds of millions of lives.”
Significant opportunity for accelerated international success
Founder Diane Janknegt is incredibly grateful for this exclusive invitation. “It is Wizenoze’s ambition to use our technology to solve the worldwide problem of low literacy. We look forward to a day when more publishers worldwide create multiple versions of their content by reading level and more authors and teachers check whether their writing and resources are matched to the reading level of the students they are working with. Our selection for this exclusive program is a wonderful springboard to bring this to a global audience. Since the spring of 2017 Wizenoze has been active in the English market. This will now be extended to the American and international market.”