edX founder and longtime open-education advocate takes the helm of a faculty-built AI company focused on teaching and learning in higher education

MILLBURN, N.J., June 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Grady, the AI grading and feedback platform built by university faculty, today announced that Anant Agarwal will become its Chief Executive Officer effective July 1, 2026. Agarwal is the founder of edX, a leading global online learning platform that helps bring programs from the world’s leading universities and institutions to tens of millions of learners. He has served as both an advisor and board member to Grady and will now lead the company.

Agarwal joins from 2U, where he served as Chief Academic Officer, following the acquisition of edX by 2U for $800M in 2021. Effective July 1, he transitions to the role of Senior Advisor, edX. He continues as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught for nearly four decades and was the director of the computer science and AI lab.

For 15 years, Agarwal has worked to widen access to education, and now he is choosing an early, faculty-founded company on a mission to give more students the expert feedback and grading that was once the privilege of the small, well-resourced classroom. His reason is specific. “I have spent much of my career trying to democratize education,” said Agarwal. “Assessment and feedback are core components of learning, and we have never been able to scale them without giving something up.”

Peer grading, used widely in the MOOC era, moves the response away from the expert and onto other students. In university courses with large classes, numerous grading staff keep it closer to the course but introduced human variability, since the same work could be judged differently depending on which grader it reached. “That is a problem worth working on,” said Agarwal. “Grady is the first approach I have seen that does not force that choice. It holds every student to the instructor’s standard, and it keeps the instructor in charge. It effectively supercharges faculty and teaching assistants.”

While AI is reshaping higher education in ways the sector is still working through, Agarwal is betting on its potential to strengthen teaching rather than strain it. What he sees in Grady is a tool built by faculty who have lived higher ed. ‘Their approach was homegrown, from years of experience,’ he said. ‘They didn’t just build an exceptional piece of technology, they worked with many faculty to ensure the experience for instructors was additive. And this could be transformational.”

Grady was founded by two university professors, Periklis Papakonstantinou of Rutgers University and Anastasios Sidiropoulos of the University of Illinois at Chicago, researchers in artificial intelligence, algorithms, and data privacy. They built it deliberately, drawing on years of their own teaching and a clear sense of what is at stake when a student’s work is judged. It was purpose-built for higher education, not adapted to it. Instructors steer the engine, and review and edit before anything reaches a student.

The design reflects a particular view of how AI can be integrated into a class. “We did not want to build an autonomous robot, but rather a sort of exoskeleton that amplifies the human instructor,” said Sidiropoulos. The instructor sets the standard, and Grady applies it consistently across the course, so the same work is judged the same way whether it is the first assessment graded or the 80th. Students get detailed feedback while the material is still fresh and faculty get back hours otherwise spent grading, along with a clearer view of the concepts a class has not yet grasped.

“We built Grady because we live this problem,” said Papakonstantinou. “Every student deserves precise, fair feedback that helps them grow, whether in a ten-person seminar or a four-hundred-person course, at an Ivy or a community college. Delivering excellent education should not be a privilege, but the standard, and having Anant lead Grady is how we make it so.”

Grady is backed by Neotribe Ventures. “At Neotribe, we look for AI that earns trust where trust is hardest to earn,” said Swaroop Kolluri, Founder and Managing Director of Neotribe Ventures. “Grady is doing exactly that in academic assessment, a domain where bias, consistency, and student outcomes all hang in the balance. The team has built something that doesn’t just automate grading; it meaningfully improves it.”

About Grady

Grady is a grading and feedback platform that harnesses AI, built by university faculty for higher education to improve teaching and learning. Learn more at gradyai.com.

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SOURCE Grady