SigIQ founders Kurt Keutzer and Karttikeya Mangalam
Students who receive one-to-one tuition perform better than those who learn in large classes. That seems an obvious statement, but the size of the advantage that one-to-one learners enjoy may surprise you; the landmark study by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found “90% of tutored students … attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20% of the control class”.
The real-life impact of this gap is to exacerbate inequality. Well-off students able to access one-on-one tutoring will perform better than classmates who learn in large groups. It’s a problem in Western societies, with wealth inequality inhibiting social mobility. It also hits hundreds of millions of students in developing economies, who miss out on the educational advantages many of their counterparts in richer nations take for granted.
Enter Karttikeya Mangalam, CEO and co-founder of SigIQ.ai, who believes artificial intelligence can begin to redress this balance. He and co-founder Kurt Keutzer have developed an AI tutor they claim can deliver one-to-one teaching of the same quality as a human educator, but at a fraction of the price. SigIQ, which is today announcing that it has raised $9.5 million of new funding, aims to offer this tutor to as many students who need it.
“It has always felt deeply unfair to me that this massive divide exists in terms of access to education in different parts of the world,” says Mangalam. “Google has solved the inequalities in access to information that used to exist; we want to do the same thing for education.”
The venture is a deeply personal one for Mangalam, who grew up in Bihar, a particularly poor part of India. Defying the odds, he won a series of scholarships that gave him access to high-quality education in India – and later to Stanford and Berkeley in the US – before working in research roles at organisations including Google, Meta and OpenAI. “I am where I am because I spent a lot of time in the best places being tutored by the best people,” he says. “Most people don’t get that opportunity.”
Building on his experience in the AI sector, Mangalam set out to address this problem directly. SigIQ has developed an AI-powered tutor that works with students in the same way as a human teacher would provide support. The tutor starts by building a picture of the student’s current level of understanding of the subject, identifying strengths, weaknesses and knowledge gaps. It plans a strategy for addressing these issues, focusing on what to teach and when. It delivers the material at a time of the student’s choosing. And then it assesses the student’s approach.
“All of these steps need to happen in a cycle for tutoring to be effective,” Mangalam adds. “Our AI agents are replicating the decision making of teachers at each stage of the learning process.”
Mangalam says the key is to develop a genuinely interactive agent that is highly responsive to the student’s needs and able to deliver instruction and feedback in ways that are personalised to each student.
SigIQ’s early results appear to suggest that this approach is working. Launched in 2023, the company has so far built two AI agents, working with students in India who are studying for the country’s notoriously difficult civil service exams, and a smaller number working towards taking the GRE tests for graduate schools in North America. More than 200,000 students have used the Indian tutor, with a further 10,000 students using the GRE agent. These students report a 30% to 40% increase in effective study hours, and a performance improvement of 18% in the first month.
Some of the individual students behind those statistics credit SigIQ with having a dramatic impact on their learning. “The AI-powered essay review feature was a game-changer for me,” says Priya Sharma, who is currently studying for the GRE. “It provided detailed feedback that helped me refine my writing and improve my AWA score significantly.”
SigIQ has also demonstrated the AI tutor’s effectiveness by getting it to sit the Indian exams last year. In a live demonstration, the agent took seven minutes to complete the paper, achieving a better score than any student in India last year.
The next stage in the company’s development is for SigIQ to build further agents to offer tutoring in other subjects. Raising new finance will help with the research and development required for this scale-up. Today’s $9.5 million seed round is co-led by The House Fund and GSV Ventures, with participation from Duolingo, Peak XV, Venture Highway, and a number of angel investors.
“SigIQ isn’t just a regular edtech startup,” says Jeremy Fiance, managing director of The House Fund. “They’ve built an AI system that publicly demonstrated its ability to outperform both humans and leading commercial AI models on one of the world’s most challenging exams.”
In time, SigIQ will also need to commercialise its business. Currently, its AI tutors are available completely free of charge – in line with Mangalam’s vision of opening up access to education – but the business sees potential in developing premium versions of the product with monthly subscriptions.
The company is competing in a fast-moving market, with education apps such as Khanmingo also making more use of AI and a growing number of start-ups targeting other edtech applications, including marketplaces such as Wyzant and SuperProfs thaty match students to tutors anywhere. The test for competitors in the market, says Mangalam, is whether they can resolve the access issue.
“Our mission is to democratise personalised learning,” he argues. “Whether you’re in rural India with dreams of attending an overseas university or short on time and money as you juggle a job and student debt, you deserve access to personalised learning.”
