Leading AI tutoring platform and South Korea-based edtech company Riiid has raised $18 million in Series C funding. Backers of the funding include previous investors DSC Investments and other venture capitals including Apenroute Asset Management, Premiere Partners, IMM Investment, and Korea Growth Investment Corporation. It is reportedly said that the company will be using most of this fund to conduct R&D and further enhance its AI technology.
Interestingly, it was just last year Riiid raised additional investment of 11.5 billion won in Series B funding. The company surpassed BEP (break-even point) within four months after launching AI tutor service Santa TOEIC and attracted the investment with positive data as a result of continuous improvement.
Founded in 2014, Riiid has replaced all workbooks and teachers with AI tutor. Through its AI technology, the Seoul-based company can provide each student with one on one tutor that can far outpace human tutors at a fraction of the cost. Riiid has even published the results of its research on its one-on-one AI tutoring technology in an academic journal. Riiid was also the first Korean company to present a research paper on AI technology at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), world’s top conference on artificial intelligence, in 2016.
Riiid brings creative disruption to education market through AI technology
From the launching of wrong answer note service “ReNote”, and commercialization of AI technology with SANTA TOEIC, to being selected one of the 25 hottest AI companies in Asia, Riiid is on its way to reshuffle the traditional education market. The company is currently providing independently developed AI technology as a B2B solution known as santA.Inside. The solution can be easily used by any education company interested in using AI technology to provide educational services that transcend human capability. A team of over 30 researchers from prominent Korean and overseas universities, including UC Berkeley, Yale, Seoul National University, KAIST, POSTECH, Korea University, and Hanyang University, is working to continuously develop and improve santA.Inside.
Santa TOEIC is the first AI tutoring product that Riiid has developed with the aim to introduce the AI tutoring service concept to the Korean educational market.
Santa TOEIC can predict a user’s score after he or she completes only 6 to 10 problems. It can also curate individually tailored problem and lecture banks in real-time and design the most efficient learning patterns and schedules. The AI tutoring service has already secured a cumulative total of 900,000 members. Currently, Riiid is able to use santA.Inside to enhance the accuracy of its AI tutor’s predictions and diagnoses through its independently developed reinforcement and active learning techniques as well as design the optimum learning patterns for increasing users’ scores.
Needless to mention, Riiid has been awarded 4th Industrial Revolution Grand Prize by Minister of Science and ICT, topped the grossing app in Google Play store and app store in 2018, and listed in the top 10 AI startup in Korea in the same year. Riiid is truly pioneering the edtech industry with its data science and AI technology. By providing every student with a 1:1 AI tutor, it indeed allows equal access to educational opportunity in true sense. Riiid is not only a world-renowned AI technology company, but it has solved the problems of the existing education market and has had a positive impact on the industry.
