Starting as a team of four, Phase One Karma initially was just a small team with a great idea. At that point, in the early 2010s, we did not think much beyond Unicheck, our firstborn.
And we did not need to. We knew some things for sure: universities had an increasing issue of plagiarism and there were available technologies that could help. We dug into the problem, gathered more people around (the image below is our first ever team photo) and came up with a solution.
In 2014, we released Unicheck (initially named Unplag), P1K’s first AI-powered product aimed to put an end to academic dishonesty by using natural language understanding technology. Rapidly becoming a success story, we opened an in-house R&D department the same year and grew to a team of 43. Keeping the bar of expectations high, P1K set the goal of championing the industry.
Flashforward to 2017. Unicheck has got itself a fresh name and a new feature called Emma — a built-in authorship verification technology. Becoming an EdTech success story with more than 1 million users across 90 countries, by 2020 when we sold Unicheck, it had a self-sustainable team of 80.
We had great ideas, we realized the responsibility that AI technology carried, and we already had enough experience to take on multiple projects. That was the turning point for Phase One Karma, a moment when "four guys in a garage with a dream" type of story transformed into a "bigger than just a product company" story.
In 2019, we decided to turn our attention to other industries. That’s when we came up with Loio — a powerful AI innovation meant to simplify lawyers’ lives by optimizing their paperwork routine. By that point, Phase One Karma already had its flourishing community, vibrant inner culture, and fully realized far-reaching ambitions.
We may not be sure what our products will be like in 5 or 10 years, but we have a strategy that will make sure these products are going to be awesome. We are building a fruitful community of engineers, managers, and creatives that loves its projects and exchanges ideas on a daily basis. We also have a clear philosophy behind our work, which revolves around the meaningfulness of each product and its impact on the quality of people's lives. And, of course, we've got a lot of ambitions that keep pushing us forward each day.