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Conversations around inclusive education are evolving in India, but there remains a long way to go. Our country is home to more than 35 million children with special needs, but fewer than one percent have access to educators or institutions with appropriate training. With limited infrastructure to support students for inclusive education, AI could offer a way to adapt the pedagogical process for children with special needs in school.

This is the principal of Cognitii, founded by Falguni Shrivastava, Jhillika Trisul, and Souvik Ghosh in 2024. This AI-powered ed-tech platform addresses barriers to inclusion in the school system for children with special needs, combining artificial intelligence with human-centered design to not only screen children for ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other intellectual disabilities, but also provide appropriate classroom strategies and trace student performance over time. 

Operating primarily from Gurgaon and Hyderabad, Cognitii offers schools and government stakeholders a scalable, technology-enabled solution that helps teachers more effectively support students with special needs.

Why does India’s education sector need something like this? 

Falguni notes that the country has only approximately 120,000 trained special educators — a ratio of roughly one educator for every 290 children — and of these, many come from clinical psychology rather than education backgrounds, indicating more training in therapy than in pedagogy.

Special educators note that this distinction is significant. Diagnosing a child’s condition and teaching them effectively are fundamentally different roles. While psychologists focus on assessment and therapy, educators must develop classroom strategies that help students learn, build independence, and navigate everyday environments. Yet many teachers in India have limited exposure to the specialised pedagogical tools required to support neurodiverse learners.

The shortage is further compounded by the geographic concentration of trained professionals in metropolitan regions, leaving Tier II and Tier III cities underserved. Existing interventions are often prohibitively expensive or inaccessible. 

At the same time, special education workflows remain largely manual, relying on paper-based documentation, which tends to prolong assessment cycles. The development of an Individualized Education Program (IEP), which Falguni highlights is a cornerstone of special education practice, typically takes six to eight months and requires collaboration between educators, therapists, and caregivers. This creates a significant administrative burden and delays timely intervention.

How Cognitii tackles this roadblock 

Cognitii’s core innovation lies in building an AI–human interface that digitizes and automates support for special-needs students across three integrated layers.

The first layer is an AI-driven early screening proxy. Children undergo an onboarding assessment through interactive games and structured prompts delivered via a mobile application. These assessments are supplemented with structured inputs from parents and educators. Using classical machine learning models and artificial intelligence techniques, the system generates a cognitive profile for each child, mapping strengths, weaknesses, and preferred learning styles. This profile can then be tracked to identify interventions to boost learning for the student.

The second layer focuses on personalized curriculum delivery. Based on the cognitive profile, the platform automatically generates learning objectives and recommends a customized learning pathway. 

The curriculum spans academic skills (literacy and numeracy), social-emotional development, and functional life skills. The app delivers content through gamified modules, which adapt in real time based on the child’s engagement and performance. Each component of the app’s UI, from its color scheme to its fonts, is designed to be as appealing as possible. As the child demonstrates improvement — for instance, in number recognition or language comprehension — the AI recalibrates lesson plans dynamically. Throughout, parents can access a dashboard that tracks analytics such as their child’s usage patterns, time spent, and developmental progress.