Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. 20,000 latest users are added every single day. These are some solid numbers for a startup called Turbo AI Launched in early 2024 Rudy Arora And Sarthak Dhawantwo 20-year-old college dropouts.
Most of this growth has are available in the last six months, the founders tell TechCrunch, during which their AI-powered note-taking and learning tool grew from a million to 5 million users while remaining profitable.
They say the concept for Turbo got here from a classroom problem that many college students face, namely attempting to take notes while taking note of a lecture.
“I at all times found it difficult to take notes because I just couldn't hearken to the teacher and write at the identical time. I just couldn't do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every time I attempted to take notes, I ended being attentive. And after I listened, I couldn't take notes. I wondered: What if I could use AI?”
So the 2 developed Turbolearn as a side project to record lectures and routinely create notes, flashcards and tests. They began sharing it with friends, then it spread to classmates throughout Duke and Northwestern, where they were enrolled until they dropped out this yr. Within months, the app reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the same old note-taking formula – record, transcribe, summarize – and makes it interactive with study notes, quizzes and flashcards, in addition to a built-in chat assistant that explains vital terms or concepts.
However, since background noise often occurs when recording in large halls, the founders have developed functions that allow students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos or readings as an alternative. This is now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.
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“Students upload a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going through 75 quizzes in a row. You don't do this unless it really works,” Dhawan said, noting that students love how the product saves time and helps them retain information.
However, it's not only students who’re using Turbo AI – because the name change from Turbolearn (a learning app) to Turbo AI (an AI note taker and learning assistant) shows. Professionals have also adopted it, including consultants, lawyers, doctors and even analysts from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. For example, some upload reports and use Turbo to create summaries or turn them into podcasts to hearken to on the method to work.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have worked together on several projects through the years.
Dhawan previously developed UMax, a consulting app that promised to make people more attractive and reached No. 1 within the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million in annual revenue. Arora, then again, makes a speciality of using social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract tens of millions of users.
Creating viral apps is a rare skill. But despite the dimensions of their previous projects, the founders only felt the necessity to exit Turbo because they saw it as a chance to construct a long-lasting company.
Still, unlike many fast-growing AI corporations, they’re wary of raising an excessive amount of money too soon, having raised just $750,000 last yr.
“We addressed this before we had much traction. We've had loads of inbound interest since then, but we're taking our time because we're money flow positive and have been profitable throughout our time as an organization,” said Arora, who added that her 15-person team is predicated in Los Angeles and is targeted on staying near the coed and creator communities at colleges like UCLA.
Students pay about $20 a month for the product, however the founders say they’re exploring other pricing options to reflect students' price sensitivity, at the same time as the app scales beyond its audience. “Currently, we’re experimenting with different pricing and doing loads of A/B testing to see what works,” Arora added.
Turbo AI sits between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated note-taking programs like Otter or Fireflies. Users can have the AI take notes or write alongside them, the founders say. This approach has helped Turbo stand out from the group, at the same time as competitors like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn goal similar audiences of scholars.
“What’s cool now could be that we’re the primary ones that come to students’ minds once they consider an AI notepad or an AI learning tool,” Dhawan said.
