Hot AWS EdStart Startups: GlyphEd, Exploros, and WayUp

AWS EdStart helps EdTech entrepreneurs build solutions that are secure, smart, scalable, cost effective, and most importantly, ones that positively impact the education sector. Check out how GlyphEd, Exploros, and WayUp, members of the AWS EdStart community, are building smart solutions to revolutionize education.

GlyphEd: GlyphEd displays data in what it calls a glyph to show users more of their data contextually so they can take action to change their world. Its visualization software provides functionality that addresses the needs of multiple areas in higher education, including enrollment management, retention, academic research, and curriculum. The software helps make data accessible to both technical and non-technical users, democratizing data science for all. Over the past year, users have discovered insights through the software that allowed them to improve student retention and save money, gain insight in medical research data, and accelerate student understanding of data science principles.

“AWS is the backbone for our data collection, input, and storage,” said Bradley Lewis, Director of Sales, GlyphEd. “We currently use AWS to host the backend for our desktop application and to host our web application. We are utilizing Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and RDS.”

 Exploros: Exploros helps K12 districts achieve their core mission – improving every student’s classroom engagement and learning outcomes while driving continuous instructional improvement through unprecedented Classroom AnalyticsTM. Whereas most EdTech technologies help with assessment or supplemental activities, Exploros assists teaching and learning during live classroom instruction.

“Exploros shifts the K12 paradigm – we provide free OER core curriculum that is instrumented to collect fine-grained learning data, and we offer a premium subscription for analytics,” said Bradley Heilman, CEO, Exploros. “AWS is core to our mission, helping us securely and efficiently provide curriculum progress metrics and learning data to our subscribing districts at scale.” Last year, campuses using Exploros during daily instruction averaged 17% gains on state testing. So far this year, Exploros has enabled students to share 10 million posts and is growing exponentially.

Exploros utilizes multiple AWS services. Their app uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, which provides the flexibility and agility required to accommodate growth, development, and ever-changing market requirements. They use Amazon Route 53 for all network routing management and Amazon CloudFront for fast and reliable asset service in multiple locations. Internally, Exploros is using Amazon CloudWatch for log and performance monitoring and IAM for all team and asset access management.

WayUp: WayUp is the go-to platform for millions of early-career professionals to explore job and internship opportunities, receive advice, and get discovered by employers. WayUp connects students and recent graduates with top employers. Top companies, including Fortune 500s, startups, and nonprofits, use WayUp’s platform to reach, recruit, and engage with the next generation of early-career talent.

“To keep WayUp’s products and infrastructure running smoothly, we are power users of Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and RDS. We run on Kubernetes with PostgreSQL databases using S3 for all of our storage. We’re most excited about some unique AWS services like AWS Batch and Athena. We use Batch in conjunction with Apache Airflow to run complex scheduled task workflows” said JJ Fliegelman, co-founder & CTO of WayUp. “Because we can set completely customized resource requirements for every task with Batch while getting the price benefit of spot instances, we’re able to scale its data processing to incredible levels while keeping the costs very low. Similarly, Athena has enabled us to give our analytics team query access to all sorts of archived data that would have been otherwise impractical to keep in Redshift. It’s really changed the game for us in terms of data and analytics processing. We’re really looking forward to trying out EKS and Aurora Serverless in the near future.”

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