AI Buddy

AI Buddy, Inc. - developer of a virtual tutor English based on AI -. MyBuddy.ai

History

2024: Raising $11 million in investments

Buddy.ai, a talk tutor AI for children, on October 31, 2024 announced the closure of an 11 financings million round, dollars bringing the total investment raised since launch to 13 million. dollars Round was led by BITKRAFT Ventures, an investment fund focused on games and interactive media, as well as Educapital, the European educational a technology fund. In addition, J One Way Ventures Ventures,, Point72 Ventures Goodwater Capital, as well as existing shareholders of the company participated in the round. Also contributing was a group of incredible business angels including Oculus co-founder, former Riot Games executives and Hollywood executive producers from cult series such as "The Simpsons."

The participation of investors from various verticals, such as AI, education, games and entertainment, is a reflection of the uniqueness of the Buddy.ai app, which pioneered a multimodal approach to AI learning through Buddy. A fully interactive, animated robot, Buddy communicates with students in real time, teaching children under 12 years old English.

Studies have shown that using an interactive, conversational character improves the learning outcomes of young children. Therefore, stories-based lessons with Buddy are ideal for younger students whose primary learning mechanism is play.

Buddy.ai 's mission is to provide children around the world with access to individual learning using AI.

Buddy.ai was inspired by watching the complexities of my daughter, who as an immigrant was learning a new language in a new country. The Buddy.ai team believes that personalized learning is a right, not a privilege, and every child deserves a personal tutor, so when we look to the future of the platform, we see every child in the world as our potential student. said Ivan Kryukov, CEO and co-founder of Buddy.ai.

To achieve exceptional voice interaction, the Buddy.ai team began developing its own speech recognition technology four years before the ChatGPT-driven AI boom. While most AI technologies are trained on adult voices and do not comply with the rules regarding children, Buddy's speech recognition technology (BSR) is COPPA compliant and tuned specifically to understand children's voices. With more than 25,000 hours of children's speech in its dataset, BSR outperforms Google and other off-the-shelf speech recognition systems in the children's segment.

Buddy has topped 50 million downloads and is used by more than 20 million pupils each year. The app was downloaded more than 22 million times worldwide in 2023. The company shows an increase in the number of active monthly users by 92% year-on-year, with an increase in monthly revenue by 93% year-on-year. Buddy fans can be found around the world - almost half of the user base is in Latin America, and surprisingly many users appear even in English-speaking countries. In 2023, Buddy.ai launched an early learning course aimed at English-speaking children aged 4-7 years in the U.S. market and posted 350% annual growth.

Kids aren't the only ones that Buddy impresses. The Buddy.ai app was named to Time Magazine's Top EdTech Rising Stars in 2024. Buddy.ai was also recognized as the winner of the Global Edtech Startup Award (GESA) Innovation Winner, the winner of the Education nomination at the South Summit and the best technology solution for training and preparation at the EnlightED Awards.

The traditional teacher-child learning model is not available to many families and does not scale to teachers. Buddy.ai occupies a special position due to the combination of technical depth, experience in early learning and the ability to create positive engaging content. Children are taught more effectively when their personal learning journey is accompanied by dynamically regulated levels of complexity, further enhanced by interactions with engaging content. It gets even better when you can cheapen access to great educational opportunities for the world's underprivileged population, commented Jasper Brand, partner at BITKRAFT Ventures.

Leveraging resources from the latest round of funding, the Buddy.ai team plans to lead the AI revolution in early learning by developing its own AI technology, continuing to refine the game elements in the app, as well as expanding partnerships with educational institutions.

2020

$1 million investment from Leta Capital

On April 8, 2020, TAdviser became known that the Russian venture capital fund LETA Capital became the lead investor of MyBuddy.ai, the creator of the modern direction in distance education. MyBuddy's technology and products enable children to learn English through virtual teachers and artificial intelligence, effectively addressing the challenge of giving students enough speech practice.

Leta Capital invests $1 million in virtual tutor developer MyBuddy.ai

At this stage, the volume of investments of the venture capital fund LETA Capital in the project amounted to $1 million.

For LETA Capital, investments in EdTech are one of the strategic areas of activity. So, at present, the fund's portfolio already includes a number of rapidly developing startups that supply interactive training services to the markets of the USA, Europe, Asia and Latin America. These are the companies Cerevrum, Devar and Novakid.

The Buddy app is a virtual animated English tutor, playfully giving children basic conversational skills sufficient to communicate in many situations. A distinctive feature of Buddy is voice AI technologies. With their help, a virtual teacher builds a dialogue with a child, thereby training live communication skills in a variety of contexts. MyBuddy.ai technologies were highly appreciated at the international level.

Since its launch in the spring of 2018, the Buddy app has already been downloaded by more than one million users worldwide; it is included in the TOP App Store in the categories "For Children" and "Education." As of April 2020, over 20 thousand paying students practice spoken English together with the Buddy virtual tutor, and their number has grown 10 times in just a year. Services are MyBuddy.ai in demand in Europe and Latin America, as well as among children of immigrants to the United States.

Thanks to the support of Leta Capital, MyBuddy.ai plans to revolutionize the market for teaching English using artificial intelligence. According to the source, in January 2020, MyBuddy.ai teamed up with another pioneer in the development of virtual teachers - the California company Edwin. Earlier, Edwin received funding from leading US venture capital funds, including General Catalyst, Y Combinator and Google Assistant Investments Program. By combining the technologies of two innovative projects and receiving additional funding, MyBuddy.ai aims to solve one of the global problems of education - a lack of qualified teachers - and build an international business, taking a leading position in the global EdTech industry in the field of teaching foreign languages.

The deal comes amid a general boom in online education and the forced transition of children to homeschooling. Obviously, in such a situation, both students and teachers need the help of advanced technology more than ever.

Many online education experts told me it was impossible to create a fully virtual teacher. We love to invest in companies that make the impossible possible and change markets and approaches to education around the world, says Alexander Chachava, Managing Partner of LETA Capital Fund

In the world, more than half a billion children study English, and only a small proportion of students reach the level of fluency. The main reason is the catastrophic lack of conversational practice. It is this problem that we solve by creating a virtual speaking English teacher, comments Ivan Kryukov, co-founder and CEO MyBuddy.ai

Merger with Edwin

On March 3, 2020, AI Buddy, a developer of a virtual English language tutor with, artificial intelligence announced a merger with EdTech-. startup Edwin More. here