Mathpresso, an edtech startup supported by Google, has secured $8 million (10 billion KRW) from KT, the largest telecom business in Korea. The financing now totals around $130 million. Google, GGV Capital, Goodwater Capital, and SoftBank Ventures Asia have all been past investors.
By combining KT’s infrastructure expertise with Mathpresso’s unique AI technology and data, the alliance seeks to hasten the creation of an education-specific Large Language Model.
Mathpresso, the company behind Asia’s most popular education software “QANDA,” shows a strong advantage in creating a Large Language Model explicitly tailored for education.
GPT-4’s inclination to cause hallucinations presents difficulties in schooling since it often presents false information as accurate. As a result, using domain-specific data is becoming increasingly essential for improving the model’s accuracy. Mathpresso is well-positioned to enhance the model’s efficacy and accuracy with over 6 billion solution searches, data on teacher-student interactions, proprietary OCR, and cutting-edge math-solving algorithms at its disposal.
The corporation will add the LLM model to strengthen its AI tutor. Its goal is to integrate this improved AI Tutor with its current offerings, such as the QANDA App, 1:1 online tutoring, and 1:1 online school (QANDA Study), to provide students with a highly customised educational experience. Last month, Mathpresso released a beta version of “Poly,” an LLM-based chatbot that provides interactive, step-by-step explanations through the QANDA App.
Mathpresso is now focusing its growth efforts outside of Asia, where its learning app has attracted the most incredible user traffic in the U.S., the biggest private education market among English-speaking nations. The plan calls for gathering user data and enhancing the precision of their model using data from people who speak native English.
Jake Lee, CEO of Mathpresso, said, “This partnership represents a significant step towards building a world-class AI tutor beyond Asia. Across all educational spectrums, our AI tutor will deliver the unique benefits of one-on-one coaching, which has long been regarded as the pinnacle of successful learning. It will provide numerous youngsters access to chances for education that are unrivalled.”
Their leading software, QANDA, is an AI-powered educational platform made specifically for K–12 learners. The software uses cutting-edge optical character recognition (OCR) technology to recognise text and mathematical equations from photographs. It provides in-depth answers and tailored learning materials. Over 80 million people have registered on QANDA since its launch, and they are spread across more than 50 countries. With most users concentrated in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, 87% of its user base is outside Korea. On QANDA globally, almost 10 million photographs are posted each day. QANDA Tutor and QANDA Study are two more verticals that Mathpresso introduced to entirely incorporate all learning capabilities within the platform.
About Mathpresso
The Seoul-based edtech startup Mathpresso runs QANDA, an AI-powered learning app that provides personalised learning material to deliver the best education possible to everyone. Ray Lee and Jake Lee started the company in 2015 as a 1:1 learning solution with a Q&A service with top university teachers. When QANDA implemented an AI-based OCR search in 2017, K–12 pupils grew exponentially. Currently, QANDA receives over 10 million monthly users and is the market leader in more than 20 nations. Since 2015, Google, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Legend Capital, Mirae Asset Investment, GGV, and Goodwater Capital have invested in Mathpresso.
