# David Yu

> David Yu is the co-founder and CEO of YouLearn, an AI tutoring platform developed from his work with fellow Michigan State University students. His background spans educational content, AI workshops, software development, and digital marketing. YouLearn joined Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch; its team later released its document-processing infrastructure as Hanji, whose hosted service closed in August 2026.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at YouLearn
- **Organizations:** YouLearn, Hanji, TWA, MSU AI Club, Y Combinator
- **Education:** Michigan State University, Y Combinator
- **Known for:** YouLearn was selected for Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch., Third place with Advait Paliwal in Michigan’s 2023 EdTech Innovation competition., YouLearn’s early prototype won a SpartaHack 8 category award for asynchronous visual communication and knowledge sharing.

## Career timeline

- **2023** — Worked on YouLearn with Michigan State University students Achyut Byanjankar, Soami Kapadia, and Advait Paliwal; the prototype won a SpartaHack 8 category award.
- **2023** — Named with Advait Paliwal as the third-place winners in Michigan’s EdTech Innovation competition for YouLearn.
- **2023-2024** — Listed full-stack, AI, UI, and marketing work at YouLearn on his personal portfolio.
- **2024** — Listed a Digital Marketing Engineer Internship at TWA on his portfolio; YouLearn’s formal founding year is 2024 in its YC profile.
- **2025** — YouLearn participated in Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch.
- **2026** — The YouLearn team introduced Hanji, built from its document parser. Hanji’s hosted API and dashboard went offline on August 28, 2026.

## Achievements

- YouLearn was selected for Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch.
- Third place with Advait Paliwal in Michigan’s 2023 EdTech Innovation competition.
- YouLearn’s early prototype won a SpartaHack 8 category award for asynchronous visual communication and knowledge sharing.
- His YC biography reports 300M+ education-content views and teaching AI to 1,000+ college students.
- The team’s Hanji launch reports processing 70 million pages for 2.5 million YouLearn users.

## Latest updates

- **2026-03** — A March 6 Cherubic Ventures interview described Yu’s approach to student retention, reducing upload friction, and personalized tutoring.
- **2026-08** — Hanji announced that its hosted API and dashboard went offline on August 28, 2026; the parsing model and API were made available as open-source software.

## Links

- Website: https://david-yu.dev/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-yu-871202244/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/1davidyu1

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/david-yu
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-11