Building the Future of STEM Education: How Vitalis Mutwiri Is Using AI & 3D to Transform Learning

speaker-1: Believe in yourself because you get, of course, feedback, some may come negatively, but it's how you take them. Is it more they are right. Or maybe I need to prove the question they have asked. This is how we can solve that problem.

speaker-0: Hey everyone. My name is Carmen Durvat and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. Joining me today is Vitalis. Vitalis, welcome. Can you introduce yourself?

speaker-1: Hi, Carmen. Thank you. you for the opportunity. I am Vitalis Mutwiri. I'm born in Kenya, raised in Kenya. And then I've gone through public universities, gone through several more funding some companies and there and then eventually settled in on Eritu. So In university, actually, I did more of health informatics and got the opportunity to present our department in Council of Governors and think I was the top finalist. They presented just our devolution in Kenya's GONON. And that presented me an opportunity in wanting to change and wanting to solve solutions in tech sector, right? And from that, once I finished university, I went on to, it was more of a venture, calling it the Founders Factory. And it was more from idea to more of business. your past, I think we had a marathon of like four weeks. You had to go through from ideation, speaking to customers, solving the problem, coming up with a pitch deck. if possible, getting the first customers and then pitching it to investors. So I think that helped me grow into more understanding how the business world works. And eventually later on, got to meet my co-founder. He's not here with me today, but he's also more of a designer. yeah, we got to now start up Adrieto. And it basically, speak about it more but is basically tech tech related and more design into it but yeah we get to speak about it.

speaker-0: Yeah, great. Well, Vitalis, thank you so much for the lovely introduction as well and to see your, you know, your journey of where you are today to founding Eduyetu as well. And obviously, you know, my next question is, how long was actually reverse that. First of all, for the listeners out there who have never heard of Eduyetu, you know, who are you? what what is it exactly that you're trying to solve?

speaker-1: Sure, sure. So, EDIATRO is based, as just the name suggests, it's about education. It's about education in Kenya. And what we are trying to simply do is, I think we all know about STEM concepts. I think we have taught every country teaches about STEM. So it's simply making students understand and visualize the STEM concepts. So we simply break down everything from science, technology, mathematics. into basic things and how we do this is through 3D. And of course, before 3D you must go after 3D, you get to augmented reality. So we have basically started with 3D and gotten into augmented reality with time. basically our vision is we envision that anywhere in Kenya, A teacher can just come with more of a device which doesn't need network, doesn't inaccessibility of maybe power and all that. And it can just visualize more, let's say for example, the art. And the art is more in 3D, right? The 3D concept, you can visualize it, see it, it can turn it around, it can teach around it. And we believe that gives... every student an opportunity to become better at STEM.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Okay. Now that's definitely very powerful that you're focusing a lot on the education sector, particularly when it comes to STEM and sort of bringing that through 3D models, augmented reality, AI, and to be able to provide people with more access as well. So in terms of Eru Yetu, who would you say are The people that you're trying to reach, are they are these students or is there any other target audience?

speaker-1: Okay, so basically in education, you have different stakeholders. And actually we have done an analysis of all the stakeholders because they believe we need all of them. we can't impress everyone, but we need everyone on board, right? We have, of course, the students, right? We have the teachers, we have the policy makers in the government. We have the government itself and we have the private sector. Okay. Government leading the public sector and build the private sector.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm.

speaker-1: And simply, we are all, we are engaging all these stakeholders, right, as we continue with the year two. But mostly we have started out with private schools, or simply you can call them all international schools, because we believe they have access to some of the technologies we might need at the start before we get onto the big vision I was talking about. So simply we're starting with these international schools, getting into the boards because these international schools are organizations, like they have more associations. So they are all the international schools meet. So you're getting into these and also you're getting into policymakers. You're trying to engage some policymakers, understand does it really serve a matter? Does it really move the need to in the education? And of course, also you're creating communities for teachers because without teachers, learning is not possible, right? We

speaker-0: Absolutely. Yeah.

speaker-1: are not replacing them. just enabling them to teach them better, right? And we're creating these communities and actually they are the better ones to buy us in into schools than even students. And of course, I almost forgot we are also the parents. Yeah, so all these decoders, I think that's one of the good problem we have. We have to keep track of all these decoders and communicate well across and share across what simply we are trying to solve.

speaker-0: Mm. Okay. How many stakeholders are you currently working with?

speaker-1: So far we've started with. policy makers, even get some government policy makers and international schools. And also I think one public school, right? But most of our focus is on international. Again, we believe once we solve it there, it's easy to trip it down.

speaker-0: Mm-hmm. And how do you reach out to those stakeholders? What kind of strategies and approaches do you and your co-founder do to, you know, gather all these different stakeholders?

speaker-1: Yeah, for the government, for the, I say for policy makers, all the stakeholders are connected. Right? If you can get to a policy maker, the policy maker knows the board of the private or the international schools, Ed. And they can make an introduction to the head of the international school. And you just need to pitch across. They simply, I would say it's of a strategist, more of connections, which is, again, targeting, understanding more of these policymakers, trying to approach them. Because, for example, we have unlocked the international through one policymakers because you have connections across the public, the private. So it's simply, if you can get through the policymakers, you can unlock the board because simply. It's just gaining trust because if you can convince, for example, the International School Association of what you're solving and one even one school and opt-in, it's for the others because they are competing with each other. So they learn, OK, this school is doing 3D. why not? Why not bring it? Yeah. OK. But simply through connections. Yeah. So it's simply targeting the policymakers and then. The police makers can make the introductions across.

speaker-0: Okay, which is of course like the power of connection as well. So I want to go back to the whole 3D modeling. So how does it exactly work? So with all these stakeholders, how is it are you like building like a platform or an app? So how can you explain it to someone who's never, you know, come from a background of 3D augmented reality and so on?

speaker-1: Sure. So we have three things. Rather to first of all the platform and of course we love the IoT eventually. But we started out with a platform and simply our idea to works. It's first of all in the context of can I let me just give the context of Kenya. I think since last year we have been changing our learning more of our curriculum from the old we call it 844 system to a new curriculum we're calling it CBC. And it has had lots of challenges. And simply it's trying to bring the STEM to be more taught on the schools than before. And this is even the opportunity we are riding on that with a change of curriculum, with the challenges that face with it. The previous competitors, we are more of level line. We are level line. It's like we starting the race together and we can compete together. And what we simply do, there will of course been introduction of new books. So what we try to do is take these books and simply we have a model that has been trained with images and 3D. So it simply converts images to 3D. So with it being trained, so what we simply take, take the data or the curriculum that exists, the books, we scan them. And then of course, with the new media, there's images and all that, we convert those to 3D. Of course, this is a process and we are trying to scale it by enabling even the teachers to do the conversion. That means if you book yourself, can go and the teacher can screenshot the book. or whatever he is trying to teach, that is helping us because it's more of a leaching our model. And we simply do that to 3D. And eventually our aim is this 3D, we can turn them to augmented reality because already the 3D, because the 3D is more of the basis of it, towards the augmented reality. So simply that's how it works. We take the images to convert to. 3D, 3D pergumentality, of course we use models. Of course there's a workflow around it all. Different things working. It's costly because it's AI and models.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah, but we are very focused and we know we can, we will make it actually.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's a very interesting concept as well because it's kind of like for all the people who are accessing this, they're able to experience learning in a very more enjoyable way, I guess, because I I can imagine not everybody would enjoy reading from a textbook, you know, they eat different forms of learning as well. So I think that's a very cool concept. I don't think I asked you this at the beginning, but how long was Eruyitu around? When did you start? founding and bringing Iduyatu to life.

speaker-1: So we started Ali last year.

speaker-0: Okay, this is really new. Okay.

speaker-1: We started last year, we went through last year, we have come into this year. Of course, the most challenging part of our business the first three years.

speaker-0: So

speaker-1: We are full to get through hopefully next year, December. Yeah, we move on from there. But it has been very receptive actually, from policymakers. Actually, everyone represented. solution they are wowed they're like when can we get this when can we get this and yeah it's it's a it's a good because yeah as we do this also we want to ensure that also we can support the business and that's where again we started on with international schools they are better off than yeah

speaker-0: Yeah. And the international schools is it just in Kenya or are you also looking outside of Kenya as well?

speaker-1: First time I studying in

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: Kenya.

speaker-0: Okay. Yeah. No, I I just want to like bring back to the point what you mentioned about the first three years. It's quite interesting that you mentioned that because I was speaking with another guest in this podcast, and he also s talked about the magic number three. So it's like the first three years are really, really tough. You gotta just focus on surviving and then eventually people are gonna notice you, they're gonna reach out to you. And ask you for, you know, your services as well. So it's definitely a test of endurance and resilience and everything like that. But tell me, Vitalis, I would love to know. I know it's still early stages, but so far, you know, you you started you and your co-founder, I believe his name is Ian.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, okay. I remember we were talking about that. and what would you say were the challenges that you've faced? face that he had to face so far.

speaker-1: First of all, is bringing the idea to life. Yeah. I think now AI is well advanced, think, even the research Chat GPT, I think, this month. But early last year, gathering all things together, there was no existing of converting images to 3D. Yes, it was there, but it was simply the gaming world. But now we are coming to learning. We have to start thinking of models. cannot, we will find the open source model and then we reach it and try to use it to more bring outcomes. Second is making the team believe. think we started out with five people.

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: Yeah, we had marketing, we had design and we had actually had two marketing. design and one IOT and of course now counting me and the founder. Of course. Yeah. And you're telling the story because the team must believe fast before you walk the Zen. Of course. And they have never had, maybe others have heard of it, but they have never heard of this way of education because it was more of, of course, the generative AI. But now you're talking about, okay. 3D argument of reality in education. Tell us more, tell us more. How do we market that site? How do we do that? I was actually watching one of Lenny podcast and was talking about three type of founders. We have the one who has faced the problem. There's the one who has the insights. Then there's the visionary one who is just trying to convince you that whatever you're trying to do will work out. That's the rich guy. Yeah, it will work out. Just believe. will work out. So first, of course, as I said, the challenge of bringing the idea to life, then of course the team. That was how to bring the message or convince the stakeholders. We have these policymakers. They have been through the education. Now there's a change of education. They haven't seen this new side of. tech and education, right? And of course, there's the fear, is AI really helping out? it really bringing out? So.

speaker-0: That's definitely a hot topic there. Yeah.

speaker-1: We are trying to convince the Sikoras that this is what we are trying to do. And really, we have to do more of a practical demo. It's no longer the story. more of, the book, is the images, or the table learning, and is the outcome. So we have to see it visually even for them, for them to get the understanding of it. Because you're telling the story. That doesn't make sense. But once you show them visually, OK, this sounds interesting. now they can relate with

speaker-0: They're convinced as well.

speaker-1: how the education is and how it can become better. I'll say those three for start. And of course, resources. Yeah, we have been running from our in-cred-fund, not cred-fund, even more in-support, from the MicroFounder. give out money, give out money, we try to manage. I have actually an interesting story with AWS, but I'll share it for today. I was almost built like a lot of dollars and I had to beg them. I'm just touching on it. Because of the training of the model. So yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely for sure. Yeah. I have like a couple of follow-up questions. I don't even know where to begin, but I guess the first question that I have and I I wanted to ask is tell me a little bit about your team. You know, you said you have some people working in the marketing team. There's about total of seven of you, including you and your co-founder, right? Or there's more people right now.

speaker-1: There were seven people, but unfortunately two dropped out.

speaker-0: Okay. All right. Tell me a little bit about, you know, how did you find them? how did you recruit them? And what exactly which roles are they are they basically fulfilling?

speaker-1: OK, so we used two types. there's one. First, we found those maybe we have worked with them previously. And then the other part was recruiting. But all that's my other co-founder's job. for designer, he is a designer. He has founded a company. He has won couple of awards in, I think, even been awarded with Safaricom. I think you are aware of Safaricom. He was part of the major team that was developing something, they simply, he simply does the hiring. So it's simply doing the poster jobs, posting

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: them on LinkedIn, Instagram, we are adding so and so. And then we do a couple of interview, interviews, of course. And then we are, so for example, for the designer role, we hired. because he needed an assistant in himself as a designer, but he needed to more operators, the operating role, not designing. So we allocated, we need a designer so that he can allocate that job. Then we have the marketing. The marketing part, we brought in someone we had worked in before. So simply it was more of, again, the community for teachers, reaching out to code the medical pants. They work, they don't work, running ads, we ran ads in Facebook because we realized most teachers are old school, like

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: they're in Facebook rather than in other social media like us. So for that, we knew someone who brought them up. The IoT is still a tool. So even though it's a small team, it was a mix of the two. people and doing the adding process.

speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. that's really interesting to hear how you know you have come to find people, whether it's someone you previously worked with, former colleagues, and also like doing a lot of the posting across different platforms. just like looking back from your experiences, how was the experience actually doing the hiring recruiting? I know that your co-founder is more responsible for that, but from everything that you've gone through together, what What was the experience like going through the hiring, recruiting process?

speaker-1: I'll say it's first of all, it's time consuming. Because we have to go through several applications to pick, find the resumes we want. We did pay for more than 80 years more to fill out the application. So it was more of the money you're going through. So time consuming, and that reduces your concentration from. What really matters.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: Second is more instinct. We are not professionals. So we are trusting our instincts to make the right decision. And then in other words, you screwed if you don't make the right decision.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: And that, of course, is negotiation of the offers. What do we present? How do we present it? So it was a learning curve.

speaker-0: Yeah, of course. And then you grow and you learn out of it as well. Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, if speaking from like a recruiter point of view, yeah, definitely it can be very time consuming, of course. but you know, with the right tools and the help of AI, not to say that we need to have AI for everything, but to automate processes, we're able to really it is possible to find You know, a good candidate, you know, in a shorter amount of time, and then someone you can of course trust as well. And of course, like what you mentioned, intuition does play a part as well. Sometimes you do have to trust your gut, you know, in terms of like the judge of character of a person because it's more than just behind the resume, it's also like a human being, you know, human being, and to see if you're able to connect and collaborate with this person as well.

speaker-1: Yeah, yeah, so yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Okay. Well, I could see that obviously there's a lot of challenges, a lot of lessons that you've had you've taken along the journey. just looking right now in terms of your team. I know we've of course spoken a little bit about this before we started the recording, but would you say there are any aspects of your day to day work where you feel it takes up a lot of time and you're like, If I could pass it on to this person, what would this role look like?

speaker-1: Yeah, I'll mention two or three. First of all is, of course, you register the business. Again, we are sharing about this. Tax responsibilities, right? If you declare maybe we have employees, the government is, how do you recompense it? Because they also need to pay and all that. Or say you say you have contractors, you have to pay more than 5 % from your money beforehand. Second is about managing, the employees. It's two things, right? It's one thing to hire, it's another thing to keep that person and to keep them motivated.

speaker-0: yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah, so you're trying to focus on the business because we are trying to keep everyone on board, keep everyone motivated and keep everyone targeted on the same goal because again, as I shared, for start we are starting more with equity and smaller conversations. So for that, it's more convincing than more when you're giving out money fully because They might be there for money, but for the other party, have to convince them. So I there might, and it takes, again, going back to time and of course, time is money, more resources.

speaker-0: Yeah, value.

speaker-1: And focusing is sometimes you find yourself more focused on other things other than focusing on what you're trying to do yourself. Yeah.

speaker-0: Yeah, it's definitely like a lot of factors that come into play as well. Also with like the motivation, the management and everything like that. Okay. we did talk a little bit earlier on. So obviously I know that part of what your business does is you are involving AI in some shape or form. And you know, this there it is quite a hot topic debate nowadays. Some people are pro AI, some people are against AI. What do you think about AI?

speaker-1: It's interesting because they have a deeper connection with it, better interaction with it. And

speaker-0: Course.

speaker-1: I know the AI artificial intelligence simply they want more of something that can think like human, reason like human and make decision like human, right? And that's where you have pro because people may find it as a way to of course reduce maybe the team and if they get things done faster. But also there are the others who are concerned, of course, the ethical way of our approach, like the security of it, the data it collects, how they train the models and also your data, especially as company. Because once your data is there, it's there for them to train with. And of course, what are the guidelines? Where do we put a stop? to AI, when do we say enough? Let's use reasoning because for me, I believe it will be a mix of the two. And I've been discussing this because we believe, first of all, AI might make you dumb.

speaker-0: Yeah, because you're becoming more dependent as well.

speaker-1: more becoming more dependent here. You're becoming more dependent and, you know, for example, if you talk about using it to do, for example, roadmaps or use it to do features and all that. Sometimes you miss out on the way to reason because you just put an idea and generate a long document, 10 pages and like, it's good enough to share with you.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: But you really missed a lot on

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: the overview because the important aspects which you suppose maybe to correct, maybe draw back another prompt or maybe improve or something else. So it needs both reasoning. For now, you need to more of guide it and direct it. That's how you think of AI. Yes, it will make it faster. The work you have to do with two days or you can do it with hours. But that hours you need also some extra time to review the work.

speaker-0: yeah.

speaker-1: Make sure whatever you are coding or whatever you are giving out to the team is clear. Otherwise, we are talking about making this joke of it will reach some point that because once you share a document with the team, they also put the document in the AI. Give me a response to the most.

speaker-0: Yeah, the AI in within the AI, it's like

speaker-1: Thank

speaker-0: it's yeah, AI, really.

speaker-1: It's like, yeah, it's not talking to AI. So no,

speaker-0: The battle of the AIs, yeah, yeah.

speaker-1: It's where we are. So I believe we need human in it. Of course, we need the god-real, the ethical part of it. But again, it's here to stay and it's good we get to understand it, how to manipulate it, and how to get the best from it.

speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. It's always let's see where you know how AI is gonna evolve in next ten or twenty years as well. It's definitely gonna be very interesting too. Okay, well vitalis, what is the next problem you're planning to solve? What is happening next in Eru Yetu?

speaker-1: Next, of course, will be the IoT, the bring up of the IoT. But for now, we are focusing on ensuring the platform delivers what it promised to deliver. But next, of course, it's the IoT. And of course, with the quick advancement of AI, it's good. The only problem is that storage is becoming a problem. There have been Ix in storage, there have been Ix in prices over here. So it's somehow faster. It's moving faster, but coming up with some, I would say, some problems by itself because storage, it's no longer the same it was previously. And for us, we need that storage because the more data we have of images and our frequency of, yeah, it's important for us. And that's, it's again becoming expensive. Again, the models, we opt to morph, go look for some odd GPUs and try to use them to train. Because again, if you go, I was giving the example of I did it on cloud and the cost was so high.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: It was so high because for AI you need, of course there's a the native AI most of us are using, but also now for things like training, you need GPUs. And for that it's cost three than the normal AI is because the normal AI you don't need, can just subscribe to cloud, can subscribe to the activity. But for this you need to put it somewhere and that becomes so, so cost-free.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: Of course, you know, like step by step, you know, you're bringing, you know, what the platform that you have to life as well. Okay. so Vitalis, one final question that I like to ask to every single one of my guests coming onto this podcast. If there was one message that you wish to pass on to aspiring entrepreneurs or founders or anyone curious about the world of diving into entrepreneurship, what would it be?

speaker-1: Yeah, just do it. Just do it. It's that simple because once you've seen it, coming up with these, we had to do it. It's not something I can, if I explain it to you, it don't make sense, but if I show you to make sense. So just do it. Yeah, believe in yourself. It's one more thing. Believe in yourself because you get, of course, feedback, some may come negatively, but it's how you take them. Is it more of, they are right. Or maybe I need to prove the question they have asked. This is how we can solve that problem. And I think I've gone through Aspire, it talks about the institutional voids because we need entrepreneurs. need people who can solve problems because there are a lot of institutional voids. And this is a solution of ways from can talk about from credibility and answers these are the people may be out there who recommend other companies we have of course things like aggregators. These are more people take up things, let's say for example, stores, people take up the second hand store products and aggregate them together. You see, these are different types of businesses. have, of course, things like Amazon who bring different parties together. bring vendors. And all these exist. They are problems that exist just for you to choose the void that exists. Because if you wait for someone else to do it, no one will do it. Plus, have to have the belief in yourself and do it.

speaker-0: Yeah, believing yourself and also finding identifying a void, filling it, and then closing all the different voids depending on which path you're passionate about as well. I really love the term that you said about institutional void. It really stuck out to me as well. Yeah, it's thank you so much again for coming on and for sharing this really early journey of founding with Eru Yetu. so thanks so much again. And for all the listeners out there, this is vitalis and Carmen from Behind the Founders. Be sure to stay tuned for the next upcoming episode. Thanks again.

speaker-1: Thank you.