Noor Akbari
Hi, I'm Noor. I co-founded Rosalyn.ai in 2018 and have run product, sales, and fundraising there since. We've delivered over a million proctored exams at 20x lower cost and 500x the capacity we started with. This year I built two products by myself with AI coding agents: Caliber, an assessment platform, and Warmpath, a go-to-market engine.
I write about exam integrity, education, and Afghanistan, where I'm from.
Work I hope you'll read
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I came to America as an interpreter. He came as a trained killer. We got the same resettlement plan.
On the failure of the Afghan resettlement process, written after the shooting of two National Guard members. I was an interpreter for the U.S. in Kabul; this one is personal.
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The AI cheating crisis: education needs its anti-doping movement
Academic integrity needs the institutions, testing, and consequences that sport built for doping. Detection alone won't do it.
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Cost is not a goal
How I'd define a north-star metric for a product that can look better on paper while getting worse. Why composites hide the term that moved, why cost has to be a ceiling rather than a goal, and why a red team with veto power beats a second north star.
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Take the money, keep the plan
The most expensive mistake I made at Rosalyn: letting a strategic investor's roadmap replace ours for a year. What happened and the rule I took from it.
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Exams will outlive everything else
Why assessment survives AI, why the market was slower than we expected, and why the answer is AI that analyzes and a person who decides.
Media
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Test me when I can: how an Afghan immigrant and a Swedish engineer are changing exam proctoring
On Martin and me.
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Masters of the turnaround
On the near-death moments at Rosalyn and how we got through them.
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My family is trapped in Afghanistan: an entrepreneur's story
Recorded during the fall of Kabul.
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How can proctoring create more opportunities for learners?
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Top 50 Change Agents, 2024
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The cheating iceberg
About
If you're in Afghanistan and you want to go to university online, one of the problems is exams. How do you trust someone taking an exam you can't see? That question became Rosalyn.
Rosalyn is AI proctoring for high-stakes exams. A model watches the exam in real time. A human proctor makes every call. No student is accused by a model alone. Since 2018 we've run over a million exams in ten languages for universities, certification programs, and U.S. government language testing: University of the People, the largest American university with 270,000 students; the U.S. Department of Defense; Coursera; Red Hat; and certification programs for Stripe and others through partners. Cost per exam fell 20x and capacity grew 500x. I raised $7.2M, ran product and sales, and led thirty-five people across six countries, all remote. Martin, my co-founder, and I still work together and are still friends.
In 2026 I built two products alone, with AI coding agents. Warmpath is Rosalyn's go-to-market engine, built because we couldn't afford a sales team: a CRM, warm-introduction paths, and buyer intent in one app. It has run our outbound since the day it was finished. Caliber is an assessment platform: describe an exam in plain language and it drafts the blueprint and the items, delivers them, and scores them. Rosalyn uses it internally.
Before Rosalyn I founded INVEDYN, a remote language-testing company for U.S. government contractors. We shipped video-based remote proctoring in 2012 and delivered 200,000 tests in 80 languages. The proctoring problem I hit there became Rosalyn.
Before that, in Kabul in my early twenties, I was an interpreter and advisor to the U.S. Department of Defense and built the biometric ID system the Afghan National Army used to stop paying "ghost soldiers," names on the payroll with no one behind them.
I was born in Kabul in 1985 and grew up during three wars. My mother ran the family's first business: she bought surplus cooking oil from families who got more UN aid than they needed and sold it to families who got less. I learned English at seven because my sister laughed at how I pronounced the brand name on her sewing machine, then put the sewing down and taught me. As a teenager I opened Afghanistan's first digital printing shop and sold it. I live in San Diego with my wife and our five kids.