South Korean edtech startup Mathpresso secures $8m to accelerate growth

Google-backed edtech startup Mathpresso has raised $8 million from Korea's telecom giant, KT. This brings the total funding to about $130 million. Previous backers include Google, GGV Capital, Goodwater Capital, and SoftBank Ventures Asia. The partnership aims to accelerate the development of an education-specific Large Language Model, leveraging Mathpresso's proprietary AI technology and data along with KT's infrastructure prowess.

The operator of Asia's most used education app 'QANDA', Mathpresso demonstrates a clear lead in building an education-specific Large Language Model. GPT-4's tendency to produce hallucinations poses challenges in education, often presenting incorrect information as accurate. As such, the utilization of domain-specific data is growing ever more crucial in boosting the model's accuracy. Armed with over 6 billion solution searches, teacher-student interaction data, proprietary OCR, and advanced math-solving algorithms, Mathpresso is primed to elevate both the accuracy and efficiency of its model.

The company intends to incorporate the LLM model to fortify its AI tutor. Its vision is to weave this enhanced AI Tutor into its existing services, which include QANDA App, 1:N online school (QANDA Study), 1:1 online tutoring (QANDA Tutor), ensuring a deeply personalized educational experience for students. As a start, Mathpresso unveiled a beta version of 'Poly' via QANDA App last month, which is an LLM-based chatbot that offers interactive step-by-step explanations.

Beyond Asia, where they've garnered the most user traffic for a learning app, Mathpresso is now setting its sights on the U.S. — the largest private education market among English-speaking countries — for expansion by year's end. The strategy involves capturing user traffic and refining their model's accuracy with native English data.

Jake Lee, CEO, Mathpresso: "This partnership marks a significant step towards building a world-class AI tutor beyond Asia. Our AI tutor will bring the unique advantages of one-on-one tutoring, which has been long considered the zenith of effective learning, across all educational spectrums. It will open doors to unparalleled educational opportunities for countless students."

QANDA, Mathpresso's flagship app, is an AI-powered learning platform tailored for K-12 students. Utilizing advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the app recognizes text and mathematical equations from photos and offers in-depth solutions and personalized learning content. Since its inception, QANDA has amassed a community of over 80 million registered users across more than 50 nations. 87% of its user base is located outside Korea, with predominant clusters in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. Every day, approximately 10 million photos are uploaded on QANDA worldwide. To integrate all learning features into the platform, Mathpresso launched additional verticals including QANDA Tutor and QANDA Study.

www.mathpresso.com