Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. About two thousand users join every day. Those are some solid numbers for a so-called startup Turbo ai launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawantwo years 20 years old.
Most of this growth has been in the past six months, the founders told Techcrunch, during which they took notes and developed AI learning tools from one million to five million users, while still being profitable.
He said the idea for Turbo came from the classroom problem of multiple students trying to take notes while paying attention to lectures at the same time.
“I would always struggle with taking notes because I couldn’t listen to the teacher and write at the same time. I couldn’t do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every time I try to take notes, it stops serving. And when I listen, I can’t take notes. I can’t use AI?”
So the pair built Turboolarn as a side project to record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. He started sharing it with friends, then spread it to his classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where he enrolled until dropping out this year. In months, the app has reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the most ordinary formula recordings, transribates, and makes them interactive with study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, with a built-in chat assistant that explains the key terms or concepts that explain the terms or concepts.
However, the recording in the big hall often chooses the background noise, so the founder built a feature that allows students to upload a PDF, a lecture, a YouTube video, or a reading. That is now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.
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“Students will upload a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going through 75 quiz questions in a row. You can’t use it,” said Dhawan, “they say it saves time,” said students that it saves them time and helps them retain information.
It’s not just students using Turbo AI, though—as reflected by the name change from TurboLearn (learning application) to Turboarn (learning application) to Turbo AI (AI learning assistant). Professionals were also adopted, including consultants, lawyers, doctors, and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and Mckinsey, the founders said. Some, for example, upload a report and use Turbo to generate a summary or turn it into a podcast they can listen to on their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have collaborated on many projects over the years.
Dhawan previously built Umax, an advice app that promised to make people better and reached #1 in the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million users. Arora, meanwhile, specifically uses social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract millions of users.
Virus Application Building is a rare skill. But despite the scale of the previous project, the founders only felt the need to release the turbo because they saw an opportunity to build a lasting business.
Still, it’s not like AI companies are growing fast, so be careful about raising money early, after taking in $750,000 last year.
“We woke up that before we had a lot of traction. Since then, we have had a lot of interest, but we use a team because there is something that can be used in Students,” said ARORES and is fortunate to close in Students and Focus on Colleges like UCLA.
Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders say they are exploring other pricing options to reflect the price sensitivity of students, although the app scales well beyond its target group. “Now, we’ve tried with other prices and run a lot of A/B tests to see what works,” he added.
Turbo Ai sits between manual tools like Google Docs and automated tools like otter or food clerk. Users can let AI take notes or co-write, the founders said. These registrations help Turbo assess even if competitors such as Y Yoelearn support target the same student audience.
“What we’re doing now is when students think of learning tools and AI tools, we’re the first thing they think of,” Dhawan said.