test-prep
(22)
Blueprint Test Prep makes the next question personal
A test-prep company built on classroom jokes now follows students from the LSAT to medical boards. Its bigger bet is that knowing what to study next can be as valuable as knowing the answer.
Leland puts a price on the right advice
Getting ahead often starts with knowing someone who has done it before. Leland turned that advantage into a marketplace - and is taking the same idea into AI training.
The Tutor Who Became an Algorithm
Juni Learning grew by making online education feel unusually human. Then demand arrived too quickly for humans alone - and the company’s most revealing lesson became how to turn mentorship into software without losing the point of the mentor.
Alec Whitters Bet His Dental Career on a Phone-Sized Flashcard
Alec Whitters was almost a dentist. Then a box of paper flashcards looked absurd beside his smartphone - and a stubborn Iowa experiment became a test-prep business used around the world.
The Dental School Dropout Who Turned 1,400 Flashcards Into 27 Million Students
Alec Whitters quit dental school in Iowa to rebuild exam prep on a phone screen. A decade later, roughly half of America's new nurses study on the platform he started - and he did it from a town most investors can't find on a map.
The Boston Tutoring Company That Bet 50,000 Kids on One Idea: Send the Teacher to the Kitchen Table
Rich Enos and Greg Zumas skipped the storefront, sent tutors into living rooms, and turned a one-to-one hunch into a 23-city, 50,000-student business. In April 2026, Intrax bought the whole thing.
Gooroo
Gooroo is a New York-based education technology company founded in 2015 by Scott Lee that pairs students with vetted tutors through personalized matching and pairs that with a library of self-paced online courses and small-group clubs. Built to make one-on-one tutoring affordable and to celebrate individual learning styles, Gooroo grew a network of NYC tutors, ran a 'Gooroo Gives Back' nonprofit arm for underserved students and seniors, and raised roughly $14M across seed rounds. As of 2026 the company paused consumer enrollments while it evaluates a pivot toward trustworthy, accountable AI for learning and student protection.
Inspira Education
Inspira Education is a New York-based edtech company that runs a house of brands connecting students with expert mentors for high-stakes admissions - medical, law, business, and college. Founded in 2020 by Kamir Kothari and Arush Chandna, it pairs applicants with vetted consultants (often former admissions decision-makers) through an AI-enabled matching platform, layering mentorship, essay coaching, interview prep, and test tutoring to improve odds at the world's most competitive programs.
LinguaTrip
LinguaTrip is a Silicon Valley-based edtech company that helps people around the world learn English and study abroad. What began in 2015 as a marketplace for booking language-immersion trips grew into an online platform for English courses, TOEFL and IELTS exam prep, university enrollment help, and visa support. Co-founded by YouTube creator Marina Mogilko - whose linguamarina channel has millions of subscribers - LinguaTrip pairs its courses with a massive free content engine, and says it has served 160,000+ students across 25+ countries.
Memorang
Memorang is a Los Angeles-based education-technology company building what it calls the AI stack for education - an all-in-one, agentic platform that lets testing providers, publishers and training organizations create standards-aligned content, assessments and branded learning apps at scale. It began as a consumer flashcards-and-quizzes app for medical and professional exams and has since pivoted into a B2B platform that pairs knowledge graphs with AI agents and human-in-the-loop workflows. After winning first place among roughly 1,500 startups in the Vercel AI Accelerator, the bootstrapped company says it has delivered hundreds of millions of assessments and serves tens of millions of annual test-takers.
RemNote
RemNote is an all-in-one learning platform that fuses note-taking, PDF annotation, and spaced-repetition flashcards into a single app, so students never have to bounce between Notion, Anki, and Quizlet. Born at MIT in 2020, it lets learners write notes and turn them into flashcards instantly - or let its AI generate cards, quizzes, and summaries from PDFs, lectures, and videos. Backed by a $2.8M seed round and used by hundreds of thousands of learners (especially medical and pre-med students), RemNote aims to reinvent how people learn, think, and remember.
Yermie Cohen
Yermie Cohen is the founder and CEO of Memorang, an AI stack for education that lets organizations build, launch, and scale custom learning and assessment content. A med student who arrived at UCLA from MIT with biology and mechanical-engineering degrees, he was buried in flashcards and frustrated by tools that were either too simple or too expensive, so he built his own. Memorang began as a free spaced-repetition study app in 2013 and has since become a platform pitched at publishers, institutions, and professional organizations who want to turn expertise into AI-driven courses, quizzes, and exams with humans kept in the loop.
Everest Education
Everest Education (E2) is a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company founded in 2011 that prepares Vietnamese students from Grade 1 to Grade 12 for international academic environments. Combining its own classroom-management software with in-person learning centers, it offers Math and English enrichment, test preparation, private tutoring, and college-admissions consulting through a blended-learning model. The company has recorded more than 12,000 enrollments and raised roughly $5.4M, including a $4M Series B led by Hendale Capital.
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.
Don Le
Don Le is the co-founder and CEO of Everest Education (E2), a Ho Chi Minh City-based edtech company that brings blended Math and English enrichment, test prep, and college admissions help to students from Grade 1 to 12. A Stanford economics graduate who started out at Bain & Company and Red Mountain Capital, he moved to Vietnam in 2007 and helped build finance, technology, and consumer businesses, including Highlands Coffee and Pho 24 operator Viet Thai International, before turning to education. Everest has raised about $5.4M, capped by a $4M Series B in 2019, and in 2022 launched a joint venture with Spark Education to localize world-class online learning for Vietnam.
Colibri Group
Colibri Group is a St. Louis-based professional education company that helps licensed professionals start, sustain, and grow their careers. Through more than 40 brands - including McKissock Learning, Colibri Real Estate, Becker, and Securities Training Corporation - it delivers licensing prep, continuing education, and career-readiness courses across real estate, healthcare, financial services, accounting, teaching, and valuation. The company serves millions of learners each year and is now investing heavily in AI-powered, adaptive learning under CEO Shravan Goli.
Study.com
Study.com is a Mountain View-based online learning platform that breaks subjects into short, animated video lessons and college-credit-eligible courses. Founded in 2002 by Adrian Ridner and Ben Wilson, it now serves more than 30 million learners, teachers and working adults each month, with one of the largest catalogs of ACE-approved courses of any provider. Its mission is to make education accessible and affordable - especially for the underserved students its founder once was.
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.
Afficient Academy
Afficient Academy is a Silicon Valley ed-tech company that uses a patented AI learning system to help K-12 students master math and English at their own pace. Through a hybrid network of virtual programs and physical learning centers across California, Nevada, and beyond, the company says more than 90% of its students advance a full grade level in 2-5 months with A/A+ results.
Joaquin Olmedo
Joaquin Olmedo is the co-founder and CEO of Filadd (YC S21), a Córdoba-born edtech platform helping students across Latin America get into — and through — university. What began in 2016 as an online prep course for Argentine university entrance exams has grown into a four-country operation serving over 25,000 students annually, with 90% year-over-year growth and recognition as one of Holon IQ's 100 Leading LatAm EdTechs. An industrial engineer by training, Olmedo applied to Y Combinator on a Mexican investor's offhand suggestion and was accepted — with metrics that caught the partners' attention immediately.
Jiayuan Fang
Dr. Jiayuan Fang is the Founder and CEO of Afficient Academy, a Silicon Valley edtech company that uses patented AI-driven adaptive learning to help K-12 students advance a full grade level in 2-5 months. A former UC Berkeley PhD and electrical engineering professor turned serial entrepreneur, Fang previously founded Sigrity Inc., which was acquired by Cadence Design Systems for approximately $80 million in 2012. His pivot to education was sparked by his own three children's experience with inadequate after-school tutoring - leading him to build a platform that identifies not just what students get wrong, but why.
Shaan Patel
Dr. Shaan Patel is the founder and CEO of Prep Expert, the SAT/ACT prep company that landed a $250,000 deal from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank Season 7 - one of Cuban's most profitable Shark Tank investments. He raised his own SAT score 640 points to a perfect score, then built a company that has helped 100,000+ students improve their scores and win over $100 million in college scholarships. Board-certified dermatologist, Yale MBA, USC MD - Patel turned a personal academic transformation into a $75M+ enterprise.