Montreal-based education technology startup Korbit Technologies has raised over $2 million (CAD $2.65 million) in a seed funding round to transform education using artificial intelligence.
The leading investor in the seed round is Khosla Ventures, founded by billionaire and philanthropist Vinod Khosla who has donated millions of dollars to education.
Founded in 2018, Korbit aims to transform education by bringing state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence. Its mission is to democratize education by providing high quality, interactive and personalized education for students around the world at low cost. Korbit’s personal AI tutor, Korbi, is real-time interactive and personalized, which is known to make a big difference in learning outcomes and student engagement, and have been designed to scale to thousands of courses and millions of students. It will guide the users through the course, personalizing exercises that fit their learning style and understanding level.
Korbit’s Co-founder and CEO lulian Vlad Serban believes that AI tutor is a new way to learn faster and better at low cost. He believes that by tailoring the learning experience for each student and providing at every step the most effective educational content, including on-the-fly generated diagrams, explanations and hints, AI tutors have the potential to provide a learning experience incomparable to the traditional classroom. He was quoted as saying,
“AI tutors are a gamechanger in the world of education. Through Korbit, a student-friendly AI tutor becomes accessible to everyone. This is an important step towards democratizing education.”
Korbit is a spin-off from the Montreal-based Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (Mila) led by world-renowned scientist Yoshua Bengio, the research lab responsible for major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the understanding of human language and the development of intelligent personal assistants. Besides Bengio, Korbit is also backed by Joelle Pineau (Associate Professor, McGill University and Head of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research, Montreal), Laurent Charlin (Assistant Professor, HEC Montreal), Aaron Courville (Assistant Professor, University of Montreal) and various others who provide scientific advice and also help teach students on the platform.
Bengio believes democratizing education through AI will transform the education world. He said, “Korbit’s mission to democratize education through AI will transform the education world, and I’m excited to help them achieve this monumental goal.”
Currently, Korbit is autonomously teaching over 2,400 students online in a machine learning course taught by Yoshua Bengio and other professors from Mila. The company is also developing a series of data science courses powered by its AI tutor. Many of their courses, including data science for public health and data science for climate change will be free for everyone. Explaining its mission, Serban said,
“Our mission is to bring personalized, high-quality education to everyone in the world. 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.”
Highlighting the immense potential of AI tutors in education, Khosla commented saying,
“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. AI tutors will personalize education for each student at a level teacher 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.”
Currently, English, French, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese subtitles are available in the lecture videos of Korbit’s Machine Learning Course. Korbit is also currently seeking partnerships with academic institutions and online education platforms.
