Built in Adelaide,
for the universities
that mark essays the world over.

A higher-education-native AI assessment platform. Founded May 2026. Built to remove the conditions under which marking degrades — never to remove the lecturer.

A letter from the founder

Why UniRubric exists, in the founder's own voice.

Marking is the part of teaching that does not scale. A lecturer can deliver a brilliant lecture to 200 students and a brilliant lecture to 800. But marking 200 essays and marking 800 essays are two different jobs — and the second one is what drives sessional staff out of the academy.

The most painful version of that job is not the time it takes. It is the slow erosion of judgement under fatigue. By essay fifty, the third-marker drift sets in. By essay seventy, the rubric you wrote in week one is competing with whatever your eye is tired of looking at. By essay ninety, you have started to grade against a moving baseline you cannot name.

I built UniRubric to remove the conditions under which that judgement degrades — not to remove the lecturer. Every draft grade UniRubric produces is anchored to a verbatim phrase from your rubric and a verbatim phrase from the student's work. Nothing reaches a student until the lecturer reviews, edits, and approves. Every action is captured in a full audit trail.

The wager is that consistency at essay ninety is worth more than speed at essay one. The wager is that markers who do not burn out stay in the academy. The wager is that grades a university can defend at appeal are worth the price of an institutional contract.

We are based in Adelaide, South Australia. Our data lives in Sydney. We will never sell student work to a model trainer, including our own. If you mark essays for a university — or you decide what your university buys — I would like to hear from you directly.

— Nawras Alali
Founder & Chairman, UniRubric · nawras@unirubric.com

Chief Executive Officer & Chairman

Nawras Alali

Adelaide, South Australia

Master of Educational Leadership · 22 years across education, technology, and operations

Founded UniRubric in May 2026 after watching marker fatigue and assessment-consistency drift erode the experience of teaching in Australian universities. A responsible-AI advocate; sets UniRubric's locked operating discipline that the lecturer owns every grade, every score is anchored to a verbatim rubric phrase and a verbatim evidence phrase from the student's work, and submissions never train a model.

Contact the founder

Chief Technology Officer

Suresh Naipal

Adelaide, South Australia

Computer Systems Engineer · Master of Business · 25+ years in enterprise systems and cybersecurity

Leads UniRubric's engineering, infrastructure, and security posture. Career spans Honeywell, IBM, Optus, Check Point, and TrendAI — a chronology that crosses industrial control systems, large-scale enterprise IT, carrier-grade networks, security-product engineering, and applied AI. Owner of the lecturer-in-the-loop pipeline architecture, the Sydney-region data-residency posture, and the rubric-anchored substring-validation discipline that defends every grade against AI hallucination.

Academic Advisor

Dr Roheena Tahir

Lecturer at Australian public and private universities · Adelaide, South Australia

PhD · Master of Educational Leadership · 20+ years in education and academia, in both English and Arabic · Published author

Advises on Australian higher-education pedagogy, rubric design across disciplines, TEQSA-aligned assessment validity, and the responsible-AI guardrails for lecturer-in-the-loop marking. Active engagement on disciplines where sensitive content is foreseeable (nursing, social work, theology, Indigenous studies) and on Indigenous knowledge-framework considerations that are increasingly required by Australian procurement.

Colophon

The boring facts a procurement office wants in writing.

Founded: May 2026
Headquartered: Adelaide, South Australia
Data residency: Sydney (ap-southeast-2)
Frameworks honoured: AU Privacy Act · GDPR · FERPA
AI training on your data: Never
Lecturer review on every grade: Required
Audit trail: Default, not a feature

Want to talk?

The fastest line to us is the founder line.

Universities considering a pilot, academics interested in advising, journalists with questions, students with feedback — the founder reads every message. There is no contact-form triage layer.