After building an AI-driven solution, Erika Hairston and Arnelle Ansong, co-founders of Edlyft, are proud to show the world that Black women engineers can make a lasting impact on the future.
What began in 2019, empowering more students to excel in computer science and secure top jobs, Edlyft landed a major deal in 2024. On Jan. 29, the Edtech company announced that Google purchased its AI Tutor platform, a virtual semester-long program that teaches students applied computer science.
This milestone came to fruition thanks to the founding duo’s ambition and ongoing collaboration with Google’s Exchange Program.“Google purchasing Edlyft’s IP and software is a huge milestone that we are incredibly proud of. What makes us so thrilled is that our tech is not only founded and built by Black women, but it will also be put to use to empower the next generation of underrepresented engineers,” Ansong said in an interview with Her Campus.
Being able to say we built a company that serves Google as a customer, who then purchased our software, is incredibly valuable,” Hairston added. “As Black women co-founders, we are often underestimated, and these facts are indisputable in showing what we’re capable of.”
HOW DOES EDLYFT AI TUTOR WORK?
The tech giant teamed up with Edlyft for Google Tech Exchange in 2022. During the program, students at select Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) were matched with mentor-led support from Edyft. And the AI Tutor program was inspired by that partnership.
Hairston defined Edlyft AI Tutor as a “web platform that students can use whenever they have a question or are confused on a concept in their applied data structures computer science (CS) class,” according to HERCampus. For instance, if a student requests real-world examples related to their question, the bot will not only respond but also display a timestamp from the related video.
‘ONLY THE BEGINNING OF WHAT’S POSSIBLE’
From
high school to college and post-college, Hairston and Ansong were innovative masterminds long before Edlfyt came to life. With Black women only representing 3% of the tech industry, the partners were diligent in exploring computer science, despite lacking coding skills, and established their own support networks. Later, they would secure top software engineering internships at Facebook and Google.“Edlyft was created as a result of Erika and I paying attention to what our own needs were as students, and really letting ourselves dream and envision what impact we could have on students similar to us,” Ansong saID.
“My co-founder and I started this company because we want to make the tech industry more accessible,” said Hairston, who previously worked as an engineer at Google. “Since founding it almost four years ago, we’ve built a successful tech startup that has closed some of the biggest companies as customers, surpassed seven figures in revenue, and raised millions of venture capital … Arnelle and I represent only the beginning of what’s possible because of work like this.”
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