Teena Paul’s youngest child was diagnosed with dysgraphia when he was 13 years old. “This life-changing expereience motivated me to help children with learning disabilities because I realized that society lacks awareness about learning disabilities in children, as a result, such children often get sidelined,” explains Teena. She started Giftolexia, which offers early digital screening solutions, teacher-parent workshops, and online intervention support.
“There is a huge gap between the potential and performance of students with learning disability. Research has shown that early identification and right intervention are crucial for the success of these children. We should intervene before the child loses his self-confidence and not wait for the child to fail,” Teena explains, citing the example of a child who was identified at the beginning of Class 8. “With the right kind of intervention and support, he made steady progress and went on to do very well for himself. He is currently a final-year student at the National Institute of Design,” she adds.
Being part of the Women Startup Program at NSRCEL, she says, has played a huge role in the success of her venture. “Once we were incubated at NSRCEL, other organizations like Cyclops MedTech and Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering began to support us as we now had great credibility,” she says.
Giftolexia’s initial plan was to license a solution from abroad, but they realized that the cost was very high and the solution wasn’t viable for the Indian market. “Mentors at NSRCEL encouraged us to develop our own product and we went on to do just that,” says Teena and her husband Ajit G Paul. Through NSRCEL, Teena met the founder of Series 5 Labs, Bhooshan. She mentioned to him that she was looking for an analytics resource. He connected her to his classmate, Justin Jose, who is now a co-founder of Giftolexia. They went on to win a work order for INR 15 lakhs to develop screening in Marathi from Government schools in a municipality in Maharashtra. Giftolexia has just completed screening over 2200 students and trained teachers from close to 100 schools in the municipality.
Giftolexia is currently part of the K SAP BIO 50 cohort at C CAMP. Teena has been nominated to the Stanford Seed Spark Program, a four-month virtual incubation program. She was one of the winners of the Stanford Seed Spark India Virtual Pitch event in November 2020.
