Founder
Why I Built Proctor AI, by Upendra Gariminti
August 2026 · 6 min read · By Upendra Gariminti
I did not set out to build an AI company. I set out to help one teacher. A senior maths teacher at a Hyderabad school, a friend of the family, was grading past midnight during exam week. Forty answer sheets a night, three nights a week, for twenty years. She was tired. She was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
That is where Proctor AI started. Not with a pitch deck. Not with a model card. With one teacher who deserved her evenings back.
The moment I knew this was worth building
I asked her the honest question. What would you do with an extra ten hours a week? She did not say relax. She said, I could sit with the students who are stuck. I could actually teach again. That answer is the entire product. Everything I have built since then is downstream of that sentence.
The point of an AI teaching agent is not to remove the teacher. It is to give the teacher back the part of the job she got into teaching for.
Why a free plan is not a marketing gimmick
Half the teachers I met would never expense a tool. Not because they did not need it. Because the school did not think teachers' time was worth paying for. So I made a decision early. Proctor AI has a free plan. A real one. Enough to grade a real set of papers, from real students, without a card. If you are a teacher and you are reading this, you should never have to ask permission to try something that gives you your Sundays back.
- 2,000+ Teachers using it
- 0 Cards asked for on the free plan
- 90%+ Grading time returned
- 1 Prompt to grade a class
What I got wrong first
The first version tried to replace the teacher's judgment. Bad idea. Teachers do not want a machine that grades for them. They want a machine that grades with them, hands them the draft, and gets out of the way. The rewrite was humbling. It also fixed everything. Once every mark became a draft the teacher could open, change, and approve, adoption went up and the anxiety went down. The teacher is the final grader, always. That is not marketing copy. That is a product principle.
What Proctor AI does now
- Reads a whole class of handwritten answer sheets from one PDF.
- Grades every paper against your rubric, with page-level annotations.
- Flags copying and AI-written text with evidence, not accusations.
- Drafts personalised feedback for every student, in the language they wrote in.
- Pulls class reports and per-student trends on demand.
- Now connects to Claude through the Proctor AI MCP, so you can grade an entire class by chatting.
Who this is really for
If you are a teacher who has spent an evening this month with a red pen and a stack of papers you could barely see straight, this is for you. If you run a coaching centre and cannot hire enough correctors for the weekly mocks, this is for you. If you lead a school where teachers are asked to be excellent at teaching and also excellent at grading and also excellent at reporting and also excellent at parenting other people's children, this is for you.
What I am building next
The next chapter of Proctor AI is about meeting teachers where they already work. Claude MCP is the first step. Next comes deeper integration with school workflows and better support for regional languages. If your school has a specific way of grading, tell me. I am one message away, and I still read every note.
If you want to see the tool, it is at https://agent.proctorai.io. If you want to say hello, I am at https://www.linkedin.com/in/upendra-akki/. If you want to help me build the next thing that gives teachers their weekends back, come and work on this with me.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Upendra Gariminti?
Upendra Gariminti is the founder of Proctor AI, an AI grading agent that helps teachers grade handwritten papers in minutes. He started Proctor AI to give teachers back the hours they lose to marking each week. You can find him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/upendra-akki/.
Why is Proctor AI free to start?
Because most teachers pay for their own tools out of pocket, and the ones who most need help are the ones with the least budget. The free plan is enough to grade a real class of papers so a teacher can decide for themselves.
Does Proctor AI replace teachers?
No. Proctor AI drafts every mark. The teacher opens each paper, reviews the score, adjusts anything, and approves. Every grade that reaches a student is one the teacher signed off on.