20-year-old Dropouts Built Ai Notetaker Turbo Ai To 5 Million Users

Five cardinal users. Eight-figure yearly recurring revenue. Twenty 1000 caller users joining daily. These are immoderate coagulated numbers for a startup called Turbo AI launched successful early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, 2 20-year-old assemblage dropouts.

Most of this maturation has travel successful nan past six months, nan founders show TechCrunch, during which their AI-powered note-taking and study instrumentality grew from 1 cardinal to 5 cardinal users, while remaining profitable.

They opportunity nan thought for Turbo stemmed from a schoolroom problem galore assemblage students face, which is trying to return notes while paying attraction to a speech astatine nan aforesaid time.

“I would ever struggle pinch taking notes because I conscionable couldn’t some perceive to nan coach and constitute astatine nan aforesaid time. I conscionable couldn’t do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every clip I tried to return notes, I’d extremity paying attention. And erstwhile I listened, I couldn’t return notes. I was like, what if I could usage AI?”

So nan brace built Turbolearn arsenic a broadside task to let them to grounds lectures and automatically make notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They began sharing it pinch friends, past it dispersed to classmates crossed Duke and Northwestern, wherever they were enrolled until dropping retired this year. Within months, nan app had reached different universities, including Harvard and MIT.

The merchandise takes nan accustomed note-taker formula—record, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive pinch study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, on pinch a built-in chat adjunct that explains cardinal position aliases concepts.

However, recordings successful ample halls often prime up inheritance noise, truthful nan founders built features that let students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos, aliases readings instead. That’s now a much communal usage lawsuit than unrecorded speech recordings.

“Students will upload a 30-page speech and walk 2 hours going done 75 quiz questions successful a row. You don’t do that unless it’s really working,” said Dhawan, noting that students emotion really nan merchandise saves clip and helps them clasp information.

It’s not conscionable students utilizing Turbo AI, though—as reflected by nan sanction alteration from Turbolearn (a study app) to Turbo AI (an AI notetaker and learning assistant). Professionals person adopted it too, including consultants, lawyers, doctors, and moreover analysts astatine Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, nan founders say. Some, for instance, upload reports and usage Turbo to make summaries aliases person them into podcasts they tin perceive to connected their commute.

Arora and Dhawan person been friends since mediate schoolhouse and person collaborated connected aggregate projects complete nan years.

Dhawan antecedently built UMax, an proposal app that promised to make group much charismatic and reached #1 connected nan App Store pinch 20 cardinal users and $6 cardinal successful yearly revenue. Arora, meanwhile, specializes successful utilizing societal media strategies to thrust explosive maturation and pull millions of users.

Building viral apps is simply a uncommon skill. But contempt nan standard of their erstwhile projects, nan founders only felt nan request to driblet retired for Turbo because they saw an opportunity to build a lasting business.

Still, dissimilar galore fast-growing AI companies, they’re cautious astir raising excessively overmuch money excessively early, having taken successful only $750,000 past year.

“We raised that earlier we had a batch of traction. Since then, we’ve had a batch of inbound interest, but we’re taking our clip because we’re cash-flow affirmative and person been profitable our full clip arsenic a company,” said Arora, who added that their 15-person squad is based successful Los Angeles and focused connected staying adjacent to student and creator communities astatine colleges for illustration UCLA.

Students salary astir $20 a period for nan product, but nan founders opportunity they’re exploring different pricing options to bespeak nan value sensitivity of students, moreover arsenic nan app scales beyond nan target group. “Right now, we’re experimenting pinch different pricing and moving a batch of A/B tests to spot what works,” Arora added.

Turbo AI sits betwixt afloat manual devices for illustration Google Docs and afloat automated note-takers for illustration Otter aliases Fireflies. Users tin fto nan AI return notes aliases constitute alongside it, nan founders say. That attack has helped Turbo guidelines retired moreover arsenic competitors for illustration Y Combinator–backed YouLearn target akin student audiences.

“What’s cool now is that erstwhile students deliberation of an AI notetaker aliases AI study tool, we’re nan first ones that travel to mind,” Dhawan said.