Looma
A final note

Thank you for learning with us.

Looma is shutting down. We've decided to close the company and move on.

It was worth it. We built something we cared about, worked with people we respected, and learned a lot in a short amount of time. We'll carry all of it with us.

The reasons are complicated. Some were in our control, some weren't. Either way, continuing wasn't the right call. If you want the full story, we wrote a post-mortem.

This page stays up so there's a record of what Looma was.

With gratitude, Avijit & Amoljit Dhaliwal.

Looma was a real-time academic integrity system. Instead of grading text after the fact, it watched the writing process itself. Keystroke patterns, revision structure, pause distributions, paired with a linguistic style model to catch inconsistency against a student's own writing.

The goal was not to catch students. It was to make integrity something measurable enough that disputes become resolvable, instead of arguments between a teacher's gut and a student's word.

It ran at Babson, Boston College, Northeastern, Wellesley, and a handful of other universities. Built from scratch, no outside funding, with a small team.

  1. 01 Teachers are users. Districts are gatekeepers. The two don't move at the same speed, and the gap between them is where good tools go to die.
  2. 02 Edge cases aren't edge cases in schools. Mobile keyboards, dictation, IMEs, assistive tech. If you treat any of them as exceptions, you're going to be wrong about real students constantly.
  3. 03 Schools are often the wrong first market for frontier tech. Not because they don't need it, but because their adoption mechanics can't keep up with how fast the tech is actually moving.