Opennote, a Guelph, Ont.- and Irvine, Calif.-based edtech startup, has raised $850,000 USD (about $1.2 million CAD) for its education personalization platform targeting undergraduate students.
The all-equity round, which closed in April, was all in simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) and led by Afore Capital, with participation from Sancus Ventures, Script Capital, Untitled Ventures, and an undisclosed group of angel investors.
Co-founder Vedant Vyas said the firm hopes to scale out of California’s Bay Area.
The three founders of Opennote are all students themselves, and they were also recently accepted into prestigious California-based startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch, which comes with an additional $125,000 USD (about $171,000 CAD) of dilutive funding for the company, then an additional $375,000 USD upon completion of the program.
In an interview with BetaKit, co-founder and University of Guelph engineering student Vedant Vyas described the company as “an interactive AI ecosystem for learning.” Vyas explained that Opennote allows students to consolidate course materials and generate videos, diagrams, and workflows. In his words, this allows users to “personalize and engage with their content.”
Opennote uses custom systems built on Meta’s open-source Llama (Large Language Model Meta AI) models.
The company offers three pricing tiers: a free tier, a $15 USD ($20.40 CAD) per month premium tier, and a new enterprise tier aimed at colleges and universities with quote-based pricing. The free tier comes with limited daily chats, file uploads, note-taking journal views, and other features. Opennote users can collaborate and share information with one another. Premium boasts unlimited access to all the features offered in the free tier, along with video generation and unlimited access to the spaces feature, where users can ask questions or upload content and get AI responses in multiple formats.
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The Opennote team is currently running lean, with the three founders—Vyas, plus University of California Irvine students Rishi Srihari and Abhigyan Arya—as the only full-time employees. They also have a campus ambassador program for students. The program has over 15 participants at McGill University, Clemson University, the University of Waterloo, the University of California San Diego, and several other notable schools across North America. Campus ambassadors are compensated with “rewards and perks” such as “payouts, merch, and premium subscriptions,” according to Vyas.
Vyas told BetaKit the core team will stay at three until at least the end of its Y Combinator batch. Then, the company plans to hire a founding engineer and several interns. Vyas also plans to buttress Opennote’s international expansion. He added that Opennote has users in nearly 100 countries, and he expects that Y Combinator funds would be used to aid in expansion and lay down important growth infrastructure.
When asked by BetaKit about Opennote’s future and where the company plans to have its headquarters, Vyas said the firm hopes to scale out of California’s Bay Area. He cited support from his US-based investors and an increased institutional willingness in the US to pilot new edtech solutions.
This sentiment echoes those of other Canadian founders. In March of this year, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan commented on how he met a number of Canadian startup builders who planned to base their startups out of San Francisco. Additionally, Tan claimed Canadian startups that remain in the Bay Area after a Y Combinator program tend to reach billion-dollar valuations two-and-a-half times faster than those who continue at home.
At Toronto Tech Week, prominent leaders such as Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and Shopify President Harley Finkelstein urged Canadians to reject term sheets requiring reincorporation in Delaware on-stage at Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event.
Nonetheless, many notable Canadian founders and companies have moved to the US. AI chip manufacturer Tenstorrent, formerly a Toronto-based company, quietly redomiciled as a US company in November 2023. Quantum-computing firm D-Wave also moved its headquarters to the US after listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The founders of New York-based AI company Clay also have strong Canadian roots, as both founders are McGill University graduates. Software-bug-catching startup Revyl was in a similar position to Opennote, having gone through YC last year and basing itself in San Francisco.
Featured image courtesy of Opennote.