Super Teacher is building an AI tutor for elementary schools — catch it at Disrupt 2025

Tutoring is 1 of the most effectual tools for improving a child’s education, yet precise fewer kids successful the U.S. person it. A 2023 survey of the nation’s largest schoolhouse districts recovered that fewer than 10% of students received tutoring. One origin is that tutoring is excessively costly for galore families, often costing hundreds oregon thousands of dollars a month.

Tim Novikoff, a erstwhile Google merchandise manager and educator, wants to alteration that. His startup, Super Teacher, offers an AI-powered tutoring app for simple schoolhouse students that costs $15 a month, oregon $10 with an yearly plan. Super Teacher aims to marque backstage tutoring accessible to families nationwide.

The four-year-old startup is gaining traction. Novikoff says astir 20,000 families person signed up for Super Teacher, and nationalist schools successful New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii present usage the app. Super Teacher is simply a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist astatine TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 successful San Francisco.

Novikoff was antecedently a mathematics teacher successful New York City, archetypal successful Harlem, and past astatine a highly rated nationalist school, Stuyvesant High School. In an interrogation with TechCrunch, helium said astir each the students astatine Stuyvesant received tutoring, whereas galore of the students successful Harlem didn’t, and the quality successful their acquisition acquisition was stark.

“[Tutoring] is by acold the astir effectual involution that tin beryllium provided to kids for education, and it’s not adjacent close,” Novikoff said. “It’s truly unfair that not everyone gets this opportunity. That’s wherefore I’m pursuing a ngo to democratize entree to backstage tutoring.”

Super Teacher’s app features animated tutors with AI-generated voices that usher students done interactive lessons. Students speech to the app utilizing voice, similar a speech with a teacher. But dissimilar galore edtech tools, Super Teacher doesn’t usage ample connection models to make responses. Instead, its contented comes from a deterministic strategy designed to ever springiness close answers — avoiding the inaccuracies that tin plague LLMs.

Novikoff thinks AI tutors tin person a invaluable interaction connected children’s lives, but he’s adamant that AI volition ne'er regenerate teachers successful a schoolhouse setting. He refers to AI tutors arsenic a instrumentality that teachers tin use, specified arsenic astute boards oregon calculators, alternatively than a replacement altogether.

Super Teacher is lone disposable for simple schoolhouse students, a determination Novikoff made to assistance his ain children and due to the fact that fewer edtech companies people the property group. Looking ahead, helium hopes to grow to younger and older grades and spouse with much schoolhouse districts crossed the U.S.

Novikoff antecedently founded Fly Labs, a mobile video-editing app acquired by Google successful 2015.

If you privation to larn much astir Super Teacher from the institution itself — portion besides checking retired dozens of others, proceeding their pitches, and listening to impermanent speakers connected 4 antithetic stages — articulation america astatine Disrupt, October 27 to 29 successful San Francisco. Learn much here.