oboeAnchor, a learning startup from co-founders and former Spotify executives Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, today said it has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by a16z, with participation from existing investors Eniac, Haystack, Offline, and Factorial. This round also saw investments from individuals such as Adam D’Angelo, Gary Tan, Lenny Rachitsky, Mati Staniszewski, Mickey Shulman, Jared Hecht, and MG Siegler.
The platform, which officially launched in September, allows users to define a learning goal and use AI to create a curriculum for them.
The startup’s funding raise comes three months after the app’s launch and a year after it raised a $4 million seed round. Zicherman said the reason behind the new round is to promote large-scale growth.
“We want to reach billions of people who want to learn about new topics and this is a huge opportunity,” he told TechCrunch on a call. “We need to execute faster and reach a larger audience at scale to achieve this vision.”
“We have a team of successful consumer product builders who can deliver well, which gives us an edge over other startups in the market,” he said.
Brian Kim, partner at a16z, said he was impressed by how quickly Obo started creating content on a topic and did not keep users waiting behind loading indicators.
“We have a thesis on how AI-assisted learning can help people explore new subjects and we’ve been looking for the right company. After Obo launched, we tried it out and loved the product. We wanted to back a founder who was ambitious, flexible in adopting different form factors, and understood AI to build a bigger platform. We found it in Obo,” he told TechCrunch over a call.
The company is also making changes to its core course-generation experience. Previously, Oboe had created different text and audio formats for users in different genres. Also, it limited course creation based on payment plan.
With the new version, the app will first understand your goal and then create chapters based on that to help you learn about those topics. Additionally, users will also seamlessly view other modalities such as quizzes in the course content. For some courses, Oboe will even create flashcards for you to easily remember the course material.
In terms of audio, instead of having to choose between a podcast format and a lecture format, the company creates a podcast for you and changes its tone based on the content and other signals it’s learning from users.
Zicherman said the company noticed there was a high demand among users to learn about STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The startup has worked on sourcing the best content for these topics, including programming.
He said that good teachers decide what is the best way for students to learn and the company is adopting the same approach in designing curriculum for learners.
Obo is improving its pricing model to give users unlimited course generation.
However, if they want to delve deeper into a topic, they can pay $15 per month ($144 per year) to access more course chapters. There is also a $40 per month ($384 per year) Pro plan, which features unlimited chapters and allows users to export or download courses for consumption outside of Oboe. The startup said it is suitable for students who want to take a printout of the study material and consume it offline.
Zicherman said that for now Obo is offering courses in English, but he wants to create better access to different parts of the world with local courses and language support. The platform is currently available on the web, with mobile support planned for the future.
Over the past few years, several tools, including Google’s NotebookLM and ex-Google employees’ Huxe, allow you to enter a prompt to get podcast episodes to explore a topic. Although these are once-in-a-generation, Obo’s approach is to let you delve deeper into the subject with chapter-based learning.
