The IIMs don’t hand out A+s so easily. But 27-year-old PGDM student YG* snagged one.

Afterall, he put a lot of effort into his first-year project on consumer behaviour. All of November 2024, he visited eight cosmetic stores, observed customer-salesperson interactions, and made audio notes of his observations.

That’s where his work ended and ChatGPT’s began. YG dumped all his audio notes into the LLM, and let it do the rest. Of course, he had to specify things like objective and outcome. He asked ChatGPT to redraft certain paragraphs, emphasise particular arguments. And several iterations later, his A+ report was ready.

He’s not the first person to do this. Neither will he be the last. And colleges and universities know that. 

It’s here that a nine-year-old startup from Bengaluru is giving them a breather. Drillbit, a homegrown AI- and plagiarism-detection software, has positioned itself as a cheaper alternative to global plagiarism detection software Turnitin. 

Though Turnitin is used by over 16,000 institutions in 185 countries—and has been around almost since the turn of the century—it’s expensive. It costs $30,000–70,000 annually. Drillbit, on the other hand, costs less than a tenth of that: Rs 75,000–2.5 lakh ($880–2,900).

Buoyed by its affordability, Drillbit has risen fast. Starting off with just plagiarism detection, Drillbit ventured into AI detection in 2023. By November of that year, it had already replaced Turnitin as the default software for the Ministry of Education’s Shodhshuddhi programmeThis is a national initiative launched by the Ministry of Education to enhance research quality and promote academic integrity. It provides universities and research institutions access to plagiarism detection software, helping to uphold ethical standards in academic writing. 

Drillbit has so far checked over 1.7 million documents by over 180,000 users across 1,152 educational institutions.