The House Fund reposted this
I'm so impressed by Karttikeya Mangalam, Ph.D's commitment to this venture. So many times as he presented his sophisticated orchestration of agentive technologies to VCs the meeting ended with "We'll readily fund you if you'll focus on *anything* but education." Karttik's commitment to democratizing education never wavered for a moment. Thanks also to those who dared to share our vision: Jeremy Fiance, Deborah Quazzo, Severin Hacker, Sharad Malik, and others.
Founder & CEO, Berkeley AI PhD, Stanford Dropout, Ex- (Meta, Google, OpenAI, IIT Kanpur)
SigIQ.ai coming out of stealth with $9.5M to build AI tutors to democratize access to personalized 1:1 education! Forbes: https://bit.ly/42mWFjQ India’s India — that’s my affectionate nickname for the small town I grew up in. The way people in the West think about India is how many Indians think about my part of the country: resource-constrained, overcrowded, and developing. I spent my early years studying in the local schools there, often packed into classrooms with 60+ students and limited individual attention. Through an incredible journey, I completed my 25-year academic run at Stanford & UC Berkeley — two of the world’s most elite institutions, where I received regular, personalized attention from professors and TAs, sometimes even one-on-one. That contrast left me with a deep sense of unfairness — why should access to personalized learning depend on where you’re born or how much you can afford to pay? I believe technology can be the great equalizer. That belief led me to found SigIQ.ai with Kurt Keutzer in July 2023, with a mission to democratize access to personalized education for students around the world. Today, I am excited to bring SigIQ.ai out of stealth with $9.5M in funding to build superhuman GenAI tutors that can reduce the cost of personalized learning to the cost of computation – thereby providing equitable access to the kind of personalized education I received at Stanford, to millions of students globally! I am grateful to be working alongside a cracked founding team – Jasper, Daniel, Nitya, Shubh, Yugesh, Ankit, Kevin & Sahil as well as a very hard working & dedicated full team – Avinash, Shrey, Kartikey, Gajendra, Navneet, Peter & Aarsh. We’re also fortunate to be backed by a group of investing partners that deeply believe in our vision and support us strongly – The House Fund (Jeremy Fiance) & GSV Ventures (Deborah Quazzo & Jennifer Lee) as well as Duolingo (Severin Hacker), General Catalyst (Venture Highway, Neeraj Arora and Priya Mohan), Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia Capital India), Calibrate Ventures (Adrien Gaidon & Jason Schoettler), Courtyard Ventures, and angel investors, such as Andy Konwinski (Co-founder, Perplexity), Christian Storm PhD (Co-founder & ex-CTO, Turnitin), Prof. Trevor Darrell (BAIR, University of California, Berkeley), Prof. Jitendra MALIK (BAIR, UC Berkeley), Prof. Srini Devadas (MIT), Prof. Sharad Malik (Princeton University), Swaroop Kolluri (as an individual), Michael Donohue, Niraj Shah, Agastya Kalra and others. We have launched AI tutors in both India (PadhAI) and US (EverTutor) with over 200K+ student users. Excited to launch a new prototype, “EverTutor Live” – an 1:1 AI Tutor that thinks, listens, talks, draws & teaches on a video call, like never before – https://live.evertutor.ai/ (live on Product Hunt right now! https://lnkd.in/djaq7CGf) 📣 Innovators Wanted! 📣 – Actively hiring across the board – AI, SWE, product, growth & design – drop a comment if interested!