ai-tutor
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Two Doctors Left the NHS to Build the Tutor They Never Had - Now 400,000 Students Are Testing the Bet
Medly is trying to sell the useful half of private tutoring - diagnosis, practice and feedback - for £24.99 a month. Its hardest lesson was that an AI marker is only as good as the messy answers it can understand.
Martin Schneider
Martin Schneider is the co-founder and CEO of RemNote, the all-in-one note-taking and spaced-repetition app he started coding as an MIT computer science student in 2017 to fix his own habit of forgetting everything he learned a semester later. What began as a private side project he used alone for three years grew into a learning platform with over a million users, backed by a $2.8M seed round from General Catalyst, 468 Capital, Soma Capital and Dorm Room Fund. He blends learning science, neuroscience and software to chase a single idea: that you should be able to learn something once and remember it forever.
Excellence
Excellence is a Y Combinator-backed (W25) AI education platform, founded by three Stanford-trained builders, that turns generative AI into a genuine learning tool rather than a homework-answer machine. Designed with teachers, it lets educators generate personalized assignments and exams, create interactive materials, and track student progress, while giving students an AI tutor that asks progressive questions instead of handing over answers. It began as an AI tutor for maths and science aimed at replacing costly private tutoring and long-term programs like Kumon.
MySivi
MySivi is a Bengaluru-based, AI-powered English-speaking practice app (Y Combinator W22) that helps Indian and global learners build spoken fluency through conversation with an AI teacher named Arya, real-time feedback on grammar and pronunciation, gamified lessons, and a peer-learning community. Originally launched as Speakify AI, it operates on a freemium model and has grown to millions of Android downloads.
Parrot
Parrot is a San Francisco-based, Y Combinator (Fall 2025) language-learning app that works like TikTok for Spanish. Learners swipe through short, native-speaker videos with tappable subtitles and an AI tutor, absorbing the language through comprehensible input rather than flashcard drills. The company positions itself as the app that actually produces speakers, aiming to turn idle scrolling into real conversational fluency.
ELSA, Corp
ELSA (English Language Speech Assistant) is an AI-powered English pronunciation and speaking coach built on proprietary speech-recognition technology trained on non-native accents. Founded in 2015 by Vu Van and speech scientist Xavier Anguera, the app gives learners real-time, phoneme-level feedback on how they actually sound - not just what they type. It has grown to tens of millions of users across 100+ countries and expanded from a consumer app into ELSA Business, ELSA Schools, an API, and a generative-AI conversation tool called ELSA AI Tutor.
Darsel
Darsel is an education-technology nonprofit that teaches K-12 math over the messaging apps students already have. Instead of an app or a laptop, students practice curriculum-aligned questions through SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, and an AI-powered chatbot delivers hints, explanations, and personalized practice while auto-grading homework and reporting progress to teachers. Founded by Stanford MBA and MIT alum Abdulhamid Haidar during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Darsel has grown from a spring-break prototype to a platform used across Jordan, India, and Nigeria, reaching hundreds of thousands of students who have answered hundreds of millions of math questions.
Pingo AI
Pingo AI is a San Francisco language-learning startup building an AI companion that teaches people to speak new languages through real, spoken conversations rather than flashcards and drills. Launched in January 2025 and backed by Y Combinator (S25), the app pairs learners with an AI tutor that sounds like a native speaker, guides them through everyday scenarios, gives real-time corrections, and remembers their progress. It grew from zero to hundreds of thousands of paying users and millions in annual recurring revenue within its first year and was named a Google Play Best of 2025 winner.
Super Teacher
Super Teacher is a New York-based edtech company building an AI-powered tutoring app for elementary school students. Founded in 2022 by former Google product manager and NYC math teacher Tim Novikoff, it delivers unlimited, conversational one-on-one tutoring in reading and math for roughly $15 a month - a fraction of the cost of a human tutor. Unlike most AI education tools, Super Teacher avoids large language model guesswork in favor of a deterministic content system designed to always give correct answers. Around 20,000 families have signed up, and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii now use the app in classrooms.
Toko
Toko is an AI-powered English speaking tutor that lets learners hold short, realistic conversations with an AI and get instant feedback on grammar and pronunciation. Founded in 2021 by MIT engineers Jen Liu and Erica Du and backed by Y Combinator (W22), the New York-based app is especially popular across East Asia, with more than 1 million downloads and tens of thousands of five-star reviews.
Andrew Mao
Andrew Mao is the co-founder and CEO of Parsnip, an AI-powered learning app often called 'Duolingo for cooking' that helps novices build real confidence in the kitchen. A Harvard computer-science PhD and former computational social scientist, he ran the longest iterated prisoner's dilemma experiment ever conducted, built ML systems at neural-interface startup CTRL-labs (acquired by Facebook), and now applies the science of how people learn to the very human problem of figuring out what's for dinner.
Michael Xing
Michael Xing is the co-founder and CEO of Pingo AI (YC S25), a language-learning app that builds fluency by letting people talk with an AI tutor in real-life conversations. The idea grew out of weekly Chinese practice sessions with his freshman-year college roommate Morrie Schonfeld. After launching in January 2025, Pingo scaled from zero to hundreds of thousands of users and millions in ARR in under a year, becoming one of Y Combinator's fastest-growing consumer companies and a Google Play Best of 2025 winner. Before Pingo, Xing spent roughly three years at AI startups and built a Chrome extension with 150,000+ downloads.
Tim Novikoff
Tim Novikoff is the founder and CEO of Super Teacher, an AI tutoring app for elementary students that has reached roughly 20,000 families and public schools in New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii. A former NYC math teacher with a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell, he co-authored a PNAS paper on the math of spaced repetition, built and sold the video-editing startup Fly Labs to Google in 2015, then worked on Google Photos and ran Google Colab before returning to education. As a kid he voiced Jeffy on MTV's animated series Daria.
Numerade
Numerade is a Pasadena-based education technology company that turns dense STEM textbooks into short, step-by-step video lessons and an AI tutor named Ace. Founded in 2018 by Nhon Ma and Alex Lee, the platform pairs a network of expert educators with machine learning to give students affordable, on-demand help in math, science, and test prep - aiming to put a tutor in the pocket of any learner who could never afford one.
Nhon Ma
Nhon Ma is the CEO and co-founder of Numerade, a Los Angeles-based education technology company building AI-powered STEM tutoring at scale. The son of Vietnamese refugees who grew up in south-central LA, he turned a full-scholarship private-school education and a two-tour stint at Google into a mission to close the educational opportunity gap. Numerade hosts one of the largest STEM video libraries online and an AI tutor named Ace, and raised a $26M Series A at a roughly $100M valuation.
CodeSignal
CodeSignal is a San Francisco-based skills platform that uses AI-driven simulations to assess technical and soft-skills talent and to train workers through Cosmo, its conversational AI tutor. Founded in 2015 as CodeFights and rebranded in 2018, it now powers technical hiring and upskilling at companies like Meta, Netflix, Zoom, Robinhood and Capital One.
Quizlet
Quizlet is an American education technology company that built the world's most-used flashcard app and is now retooling itself as an AI-powered study coach. Founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old high schooler studying for a French final, it has grown into a platform used by tens of millions of students each month across more than 130 countries.
Speak
Speak is an AI-powered language learning app that gets users speaking out loud from day one. Backed by OpenAI's Startup Fund, Accel, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the San Francisco company reached unicorn status in December 2024 after raising a $78M Series C at a $1B valuation. Its AI tutor offers unlimited conversational practice and instant feedback to over 10 million learners.
YouLearn
YouLearn is an AI-powered personalized tutoring platform built by students, for students. Founded by three college friends frustrated with outdated lecture videos and generic AI tools, YouLearn transforms any learning material - PDFs, YouTube videos, lecture slides, even photos - into concise notes, adaptive quizzes, and an interactive AI tutor. With 2M+ users globally, $770K ARR, and backing from Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch, YouLearn is building what they call a modern-day Aristotle: a lifelong AI tutor that grows alongside each student.