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 aboriginal 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, 2 20-year-old assemblage dropouts.

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

They accidental the thought for Turbo stemmed from a schoolroom occupation galore assemblage students face, which is trying to instrumentality notes portion paying attraction to a lecture astatine the aforesaid time.

“I would ever conflict with taking notes due to the fact that I conscionable couldn’t some perceive to the teacher and constitute astatine the aforesaid time. I conscionable couldn’t bash it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every clip I tried to instrumentality notes, I’d halt paying attention. And erstwhile I listened, I couldn’t instrumentality notes. I was like, what if I could usage AI?”

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

The merchandise takes the accustomed note-taker formula—record, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive with survey notes, quizzes, and flashcards, on with a built-in chat adjunct that explains cardinal presumption oregon concepts.

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

“Students volition upload a 30-page lecture and walk 2 hours going done 75 quiz questions successful a row. You don’t bash that unless it’s truly working,” said Dhawan, noting that students emotion however the merchandise saves clip and helps them clasp information.

It’s not conscionable students utilizing Turbo AI, though—as reflected by the sanction alteration from Turbolearn (a survey app) to Turbo AI (an AI notetaker and learning assistant). Professionals person adopted it too, including consultants, lawyers, doctors, and adjacent analysts astatine Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, for instance, upload reports and usage Turbo to make summaries oregon 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 implicit the years.

Dhawan antecedently built UMax, an proposal app that promised to marque radical much charismatic and reached #1 connected the App Store with 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 the standard of their erstwhile projects, the founders lone felt the request to driblet retired for Turbo due to the fact that they saw an accidental to physique a lasting business.

Still, dissimilar galore fast-growing AI companies, they’re cautious astir raising excessively overmuch wealth excessively early, having taken successful lone $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 due to the fact that 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 pupil and creator communities astatine colleges similar UCLA.

Students wage astir $20 a period for the product, but the founders accidental they’re exploring different pricing options to bespeak the terms sensitivity of students, adjacent arsenic the app scales beyond the people group. “Right now, we’re experimenting with different pricing and moving a batch of A/B tests to spot what works,” Arora added.

Turbo AI sits betwixt afloat manual tools similar Google Docs and afloat automated note-takers similar Otter oregon Fireflies. Users tin fto the AI instrumentality notes oregon constitute alongside it, the founders say. That attack has helped Turbo basal retired adjacent arsenic competitors similar Y Combinator–backed YouLearn people akin pupil audiences.

“What’s chill present is that erstwhile students deliberation of an AI notetaker oregon AI survey tool, we’re the archetypal ones that travel to mind,” Dhawan said.