Interview

An Interview With Upendra Gariminti, Founder of Proctor AI

August 2026 · 8 min read · By Upendra Gariminti

Upendra Gariminti is the founder of Proctor AI. We sat down with him after the launch of the Claude MCP to talk about what he has learned building an AI tool for teachers, why every plan starts free, and what he wishes he had known when he shipped version one. The conversation has been edited for length. Nothing has been softened.

You could have built for any industry. Why teachers?

Because teachers are the last group in India that gets asked to work harder every year without being asked what they need. I grew up around teachers. My mother is one. Her friends are teachers. Every one of them will tell you the same thing. They love the classroom. They dread the grading. Nobody has built a tool that just handles the grading well. So I built it.

What is the one metric you look at?

Papers graded per hour of teacher work saved. Not accuracy. Not revenue. Time returned. If Proctor AI does not return an hour to a teacher this week, we did not do our job. Everything else, the accuracy numbers, the pricing plans, the MCP, is downstream of that.

If a tool does not give a teacher an hour back this week, it does not belong on her desktop.

You started with a free plan. Is that going to stay free?

Yes. Forever. And I am putting it in writing so you can quote me later. The free plan lets a teacher grade real papers from real students without a card. It is not a trial. It is a plan. We pay for it because we believe the teachers who most need this help are the ones who cannot expense it. If we ever stop, hold us to it.

What did you get wrong in version one?

I built a tool that graded for the teacher. Teachers hated it. They did not want a black box that returned marks. They wanted a draft they could argue with. So we rebuilt it as a draft-and-approve workflow. Every mark is a draft. The teacher opens each paper, sees the reason for the mark, adjusts, and approves. That change is the single biggest reason teachers stayed.

Why does the Claude MCP matter?

Because a lot of teachers already use Claude for lesson planning. They do not want to learn another dashboard. The MCP lets them do the grading in the same chat window they were already using. Add the connector once, and Claude can grade a class, run integrity checks, draft feedback, and pull reports, just by chatting. If you use Claude Code or the Claude CLI, the same URL works there too. Anywhere Claude runs, Proctor AI is one prompt away.

What is the hardest part of building for teachers?

Trust. Teachers are burned out on ed-tech tools that promise the world and deliver a checklist. Every one of them has installed something that broke the class, or made them look silly, or lost a week's data. You have to earn trust one grading session at a time. And once you have it, you have to keep earning it. That is why I still answer every WhatsApp message from every teacher who has ever used the tool. That is not a scaling strategy. It is a promise.

Where do you see Proctor AI in three years?

In every serious classroom in India that grades handwritten work. And, honestly, in a lot of them outside India too. But the mission has never been world domination. It is to make sure no teacher grades past midnight because a system asked her to. If we hit that, we win, whether the number of schools is one thousand or one hundred thousand.

One thing you want teachers reading this to do today

Take one class of papers you have been dreading. Go to https://agent.proctorai.io, upload them, and grade them with the free plan. Do not tell anyone you are trying it. Just see if it saves your evening. If it does, tell one teacher friend. That is how this reaches the people who need it.

You can find Upendra Gariminti on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/upendra-akki/. He reads every message.

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