Montreal-based Korbit Technologies has announced the close of its $2.65 million seed round.
The round was led by Khosla Ventures, a venture firm founded by billionaire Vinod Khosla, who was also an investor in Toronto AI company Deep Genomics’ $16 million round.
“Through Korbit, a student-friendly AI tutor becomes accessible to everyone.”
– Iulian Vlad Serban
Korbit is a spin-off of research at Montreal’s Mila lab, which is led by Yoshua Bengio. Bengio is acting as an advisor to the company, along with Joëlle Pineau, who is leading Facebook’s AI lab, Aaron Courville, a member of Mila, and Laurent Charlin, an assistant professor at HEC Montreal, McGill University’s business school. The advisors also teach students on the platform.
Korbit provides a platform where students can complete courses in machine learning. Courses are led by an AI tutor, called Korbi, and students can ask questions, complete exercises, and get feedback. Each time students complete exercises, the course adapts itself to each student’s personal learning profile. So far, the platform claims to have attracted 2,400 students.
“AI tutors have the potential to fix the fundamental problems of our education system by leaving scarce teacher time for the human elements of education like mentoring and coaching,” said Khosla. “AI tutors will personalize education for each student at a level teachers cannot do. They will be able to assess where a student is, know the map of their knowledge and gaps in it and be able to guide a student towards their personal learning objectives at far lower levels of spending.”
Korbit’s goal is to democratize education with high-quality, interactive, and personalized education for students around the world at low cost. The company was founded in 2018 and is led by Iulian Vlad Serban, who completed his PhD in AI and personal assistants technology at Mila.
“AI tutors are a gamechanger in the world of education,” said Serban. “Through Korbit, a student-friendly AI tutor becomes accessible to everyone. This is an important step towards democratizing education.”
“Our mission is to bring personalized, high-quality education to everyone in the world,” he added. “In the next five years, the human race will face inevitable climate change and will need educated people to save our world and fight for climate justice.”
So far, Korbit’s courses are available in English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.
