Skaadi Ltd is the company behind WizardTeacher, an AI-powered education platform designed to make the journey to studying abroad more accessible and affordable for students around the world. Founded by Sadia Hamid, the Sheffield-based EdTech startup is preparing to launch a platform that brings together university shortlisting, application support, exam preparation and career guidance under one membership. Drawing on two decades of experience across technology, consulting and product leadership, Sadia is putting her expertise to work on a problem inspired by her own journey as an international student. In this Company Spotlight, she shares the thinking behind WizardTeacher, her approach to building trustworthy AI products, and why she believes globally ambitious technology businesses can thrive outside the UK’s biggest tech hubs.
Making the journey to studying abroad more accessible
WizardTeacher has been shaped by Sadia’s professional experience in EdTech, but also by her own journey as an international student coming to the UK. She describes her product as: “An AI-powered platform that supports students through the entire study-abroad journey: shortlisting universities, preparing applications, excelling in gateway tests like IELTS, TOEFL, PTE, SAT and ACT, and navigating the career beyond, all under one membership priced for students rather than institutions.”
Sadia has designed WizardTeacher for the millions of students worldwide whose futures can be dictated, in part by these tests, especially those who can’t afford private tutors and premium subscriptions.
“The inspiration was partly professional, from my time working in a global student recruitment marketplace where I saw how fragmented and expensive preparation really is, and partly personal,” Sadia reflects, adding: “I came to the UK as an international student myself. I know what it is to sit on the wrong side of an exam table with your next five years riding on a Saturday morning test slot. That feeling never leaves you, and WizardTeacher is my answer to it.”
The platform brings together services that students would otherwise have to source from multiple providers, from exam preparation and university research to application support and career guidance.
“Today a typical student stitches together a question bank on one site, a video course on another, a tutor if the family can stretch to it, separate tools for university research, application documents and CV help, and none of them talk to each other. It adds up fast, in money and in confusion,” Sadia says.
By bringing it all together in one product, students can prepare for tests, compare results to official marking criteria, undertake university shortlisting and gain application support and career guidance after graduation.
The real point of difference, according to Sadia, is the feedback loop, whereby a student finishes a practice essay and gets it back in under a minute, scored to the official criteria, showing exactly which sentences cost marks and how to fix them.
“That depth of feedback used to need a trained examiner and a week’s wait,” she explains. “On the applications side, a real person reads and reworks every document before it reaches the student. Same standards, at a price a student can actually pay.”
Building AI with trust at its core
Sadia has designed and built WizardTeacher herself, drawing on around 20 years of experience across sales and marketing, FMCG, management consulting, telecoms, Fintech and EdTech. Her work has included leading digital transformation at scale and building AI-powered systems to manage complex data.
She says the fundamentals of successful product development remain consistent, regardless of the industry.
“My career started in sales and marketing, not product, and that turned out to be the making of me. Selling teaches you what people actually value, fast. From there I moved through FMCG, management consulting across the Middle East, telecoms and fintech at serious scale, and finally EdTech.”
Sadia identified a thread connecting all of these experiences: “I kept being handed messy, ambiguous problems and asked to turn them into something customers would pay for.
“Working across industries taught me that the fundamentals never change: understand the customer deeply, respect the data, decide what not to build, and remember that a product nobody can use is just expensive software. The surfaces change, the discipline doesn’t.”
Her experience at DU, one of the Middle East’s major telecoms and Fintech operators, included leading a programme covering more than nine million customers. At Keystone Education Group, she built an AI publishing pipeline supporting more than 150,000 programme listings across 28 locales.
That experience has informed her approach to WizardTeacher, particularly the importance of reliable data and ensuring AI is used where it adds value without compromising the quality of the service.
Considering the main challenges she has faced in her founder journey, Sadia candidly says: “Everything breaks, usually at 2am.” She goes on to explain, “The biggest early challenge wasn’t code, it was context. AI builds confidently on top of whatever you feed it, and if your source material is messy or duplicated, it produces plausible nonsense. So I did the unglamorous groundwork first: a full cleansing of our content and data so everything the AI touches is current, clean and consistent. Ground truth first, generation second.”
Sadia has a key rule that she sticks to in using AI: “Let AI do what’s cheap to get wrong and easy to catch, and keep humans on what’s expensive to get wrong when it fails.”
She firmly believes that students’ scores and futures sit firmly in the second category, which is why every piece of feedback is built against official marking criteria, with the scoring validated in Sadia’s own code. WizardTeacher also comes with a guarantee that no application document will ever reach a student until a person has read it line by line. As Sadia says, “This ensures that AI makes the experience fast; judgement makes it trustworthy.”
Building ethically is just part of the challenge, user experience is also at the top of Sadia’s priority list – but how does she approach this?
“It means the complexity is mine to carry, not the user’s. Behind WizardTeacher sit more than a dozen integrated services, AI pipelines, payment systems and scoring engines. The student sees none of it. They see: write your essay, get your feedback, know exactly what to fix. That simplicity is the hardest thing to build.
“In practice it means sweating details users will never consciously notice, saying no to features that would impress other builders but confuse a seventeen-year-old in Lahore, and testing relentlessly. Throughout my career, the products I’m proudest of are the ones people describe as ‘simple’. Nothing about them was.”
From corporate product leadership to being a founder
After years of working in large organisations, Sadia is now transferring that experience to a business she is building with her wife, who brings her own expertise in HR and recruitment.
The move into founding a startup came at a turning point in her career. When her previous role ended, she began looking for another position, but the experience prompted her to reconsider what she wanted to do next.
“When my last role came to an end earlier this year, I did the sensible thing: polished the CV, applied, interviewed. One rejection called me overqualified, another underqualified, in the same week. Somewhere between those two emails I realised I was asking strangers for permission to do the thing I’d spent two decades doing. So I stopped asking.”
Although Sadia is leading much of the business and product development, she is keen to recognise the shared effort behind WizardTeacher.
“My wife co-founded this with me and we have built it side by side. She brings years of HR and recruitment experience that I simply do not have, and the content, the curriculum and the careers side have been long nights for both of us.”
Moving from a corporate environment to starting and running a business has meant taking responsibility for everything from infrastructure and marketing to pricing and compliance, without the support systems of a larger organisation.
“The biggest adjustment is that there’s nobody else to escalate to,” Sadia comments. “Legal, pricing, infrastructure, marketing, compliance, it all lands on my desk, and the buck doesn’t just stop with me, it starts with me too.” She adds, “What I’ve learned is that twenty years of corporate experience translates better than I feared, but founders need one extra muscle: comfort with being gloriously, permanently out of your depth in at least one area every single day. I’ve grown to quite like it.”
Why Sheffield?
Building WizardTeacher in Sheffield is about more than finding a place to base the business. It is an opportunity for Sadia to contribute to a local tech community while challenging assumptions about where ambitious technology companies can be built.
“Sheffield is home. When we settled here, I found a city with low costs, real warmth, and a tech community that genuinely answers its emails – which anyone who has worked in bigger tech hubs will know is rarer than it sounds. There’s also a point of principle in it: the ecosystem conversation in this country rarely looks north of the M25, and I like the idea of proving a globally ambitious product can be built from a spare room in South Yorkshire.
“Building here has been a lovely surprise. Within weeks of joining the community I’d been welcomed, listed, connected and signed up as a mentor. Try getting that in London for the price of a Sheffield coffee.”
Sadia is already getting involved in the community through mentoring and is particularly keen to support women and career changers entering the tech industry.
“I’ve joined the mentoring scheme as a mentor because mentorship changed my own career at a critical moment, and I want to give that back.”
She has some other objectives that she hopes to achieve through Sheffield Digital membership, including meaningful and honest conversations with peers. She explains,
“I’d love to swap honest notes with other founders about building with AI, because the gap between the hype and the reality is wide and nobody benefits from pretending otherwise.”
Sadia is also looking for opportunities in the city, to support the growth of WizardTeacher. “As we grow beyond launch, Sheffield is where I’d like to hire, partner and put down deeper roots. If WizardTeacher succeeds, I want the city to feel some of that success too.”
What can we expect to see next?
WizardTeacher is launching in stages, with university and career support arriving first, followed by test preparation and full mock tests around a month later. Sadia is taking a measured approach to the rollout, prioritising quality and feedback from students over launching every feature at once.
“I would rather open one thing properly than five things badly,” she says, adding: “Then we get WizardTeacher into students’ hands and let their results shape the roadmap. Success in year one looks like real students passing real tests and telling us the platform made the difference, especially students who could never have afforded the traditional route.”
Looking further ahead, Sadia wants WizardTeacher to support students well beyond their initial exams, accompanying them through university applications, preparation, study and their early careers.
“Longer term, I want WizardTeacher to be the companion for the whole journey: the student who finds their university through us, prepares with us, passes with us, and comes back for career guidance after graduation. As a business, I want it sustainable and growing from Sheffield, creating local jobs while serving students in Lagos, Lahore and Manila.
“If a student who couldn’t afford a tutor gets detailed feedback against the official criteria in under a minute and it changes their result, that’s the whole point. Everything else is scaffolding around that.”
WizardTeacher has the potential to make a positive impact on the lives of students globally, whilst creating opportunities and contributing to the city’s growing tech ecosystem. We’re really pleased to have this ambitious startup join our community and look forward to seeing WizardTeacher go live!
Visit the website to see more about WizardTeacher and be amongst the first to know when the product launches: www.wizardteacher.com.