A duo of college dropouts have developed one of the world’s most popular AI-powered note taking tools.
Turbo AI, created by 20-year-olds Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, has 5 million users and growing. They launched the startup early last year and it is already pulling in over US$10 million in annual revenue.
They explained to TechCrunch this week that the majority of Turbo AI’s growth has occurred within the past six months. It went from only 1 million users to 5 million this year. Their company now has a 15-person team, headquartered in Los Angeles.
Prominent firms like Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE: GS), Deloitte and McKinsey & Company are currently utilizing Turbo AI. Over 20,000 ordinary people start using the AI notepad tool every day now on average.
It can record lectures and automatically generate flashcards and quizzes to help enhance a person’s learning process. It also features a chatbot assistant that will help explain key concepts.
Turbo AI has quickly gained popularity among scholars, even spreading to prominent schools such as MIT and Harvard.
Arora and Dhawan were inspired to create the system after sitting in class and not being able to take notes effectively while listening at the same time.
Though popular, Turbo AI is quite expensive in comparison to other popular AI-integrated note taking systems. They are currently charging US$20 per month for it, but say they may lessen the price.
Other popular notepad tools with artificial intelligence capabilities, such as Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai or Notion AI, only charge half as much or less.
This is not the first time that Dhawan and Arora have collaborated on tech initiatives but it is the first time that one of their projects was deemed worthy of dropping out of school over. Turbo AI’s profitability has made it suitable to justify such a course of action at their age. Dhawan is also a co-founder of the popular advice app UMax.
Last week, Turbo AI partnered with the Mark Cuban Foundation for its AI Bootcamp initiative. It aims to build AI literacy among youth, particularly in underserved communities.
In 2021, Arora and Dhawan won Washington D.C.’s Congressional App Challenge for an app they made called WorkBee.
Read more: Wonder Studios raises US$12M in seed for AI film production
Follow Rowan Dunne on LinkedIn
rowan@mugglehead.com
