Sainaptic, the UK edtech company founded by Rajeshwari Iyer and Kavitha Ravindran, has raised £1M in a seed round co-led by Cornerstone VC and Ufi Ventures. Vocational and professional qualifications are hard to mark quickly. Learners hand in short answers, essays, reports, presentations and recorded discussions rather than multiple-choice tests, and each needs a trained assessor, sometimes for as long as 90 minutes. The backlog delays feedback and certification, holds up learners waiting to start work, and keeps costs high for the organisations running assessments. Sainaptic trains its models on domain-specific data and on how a client’s own experts mark, then applies that judgement across submissions and drafts feedback for each learner. Qualified assessors keep the final decision. Alongside the round it announced a partnership with Skilltech Solutions, an assessment management software provider. The deal will put the models in front of some of the UK’s largest apprenticeship assessment organisations, starting with portfolio marking on selected apprenticeship standards from the first quarter of 2027. The company says marking for some qualifications has fallen from 45 minutes to eight seconds, with less than 1 per cent deviation from expert assessors and potential savings of up to £150,000 a year. It says it has marked more than two million written answers. Safety Training Awards, a customer, says its assessors have yet to change a grade the system recommended. Sainaptic previously went through Tech Nation’s Applied AI programme and counted Brighteye Ventures as an early backer. Elm Venture Partners and Brighteye Ventures also took part in the round. Sainaptic will use the money to move beyond marking and feedback into quality assurance, analytics and personalised assessments, and to grow its engineering, product and sales teams. Sources