Copenhagen startup Alice.Tech has raised $4.8 million for its AI-driven learning platform.
The startup personalizes learning by converting generic study materials into tailored content.
BI got an exclusive look at the pitch deck the startup used to secure the fresh funding.
A Copenhagen-based startup has secured $4.8 million for its AI-enabled personalized learning platform.
Alice.Tech, which launched in 2024 and participated in the Y Combinator accelerator, takes generic course materials and uses AI to turn them into tailored learning content for students.
"We do what Duolingo did for language learning, but for university or high school exams," Kim Rants, the startup's cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.
The startup says it personalizes material to suit each student's learning style, from key theme explainers to multiple-choice questions and flashcards. It also creates study plans to help students better prepare for exams.
"We target what the student needs to study," based on real-time analysis of their progress, Rants added.
Students also have a social learning option, where they can collaborate and study with friends via the platform.
Rants said he founded the company because he experienced how problematic a "one size fits all" model of learning could be. "The most challenged students get left behind; I could see how much students struggled with exams, because the learning wasn't tailored to their needs," he explained.
Alice.Tech offers a subscription-based freemium model. Students can opt for a monthly or yearly subscription, and the startup is also working with some universities and high schools that are interested in its product.
The $4.8 million round was led by Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator, with participation from existing investor PSV Tech, and angel investors from the US and Europe.
With the cash injection, the startup said it would double down on its product development and growth.
Check out the pitch deck Alice.Tech used to secure the fresh funding.
Kira Learning, chaired by Andrew Ng, launches AI agents to assist teachers in the classroom.
The platform aims to transform learning by making it easier to customize for students.
"AI is helping redefine what it means to be a great teacher," Ng told BI.
The classroom is getting a tech upgrade with AI-powered teaching assistants.
Kira Learning, an edtech startup chaired by Google Brain founder, Stanford professor, and AI researcher Andrew Ng has unveiled a new platform that brings AI agents to the classroom.
Kira's AI agents will carry out the repetitive tasks that often consume hours of teachers' time. They can help with grading, lesson planning, and analyzing classroom discussions to provide insights on which students are succeeding and which students are struggling. The platform also offers one-on-one tutoring for students.
The company says its goal is to free teachers up to focus on shaping the learning process — as opposed to just conveying information.
As AI becomes more integrated into classrooms, Ng sees this as part of broader transformation of teachers' roles.
"AI is helping redefine what it means to be a great teacher," he told Business Insider by email. "Traditionally, we've expected teachers to be subject matter experts. But with the workforce changing so rapidly and schools introducing new subjects to prepare students for a rapidly evolving world, what happens when a teacher is asked to teach something entirely new, say, computer science, without years of experience in that field?"
Kira has done this dance before. It launched in 2021 with the aim of helping teachers without a background in computer science teach the subject effectively. At the time, several states were ramping up legislation around making computer science a requirement to graduate from high school.
Kira Learning's team, chairman Andrew Ng, cofounder and CEO Andrea Pasinetti, and cofounder and vice president of artificial intelligence Jagriti Agarwal.
Kira Learning
"Computer science started being introduced into high schools in a way that existed at parity with subjects like English and biology and history," Andrea Pasinetti, cofounder and CEO of Kira told BI. "Between legislation being passed and it becoming a requirement for students, there was often a window of one, at most two years, and that required training."
To help teachers quickly get up to speed, Kira developed AI tutors to help teachers master the subjects. It also developed AI teaching assistants to help them in the classroom. In 2023, it partnered with the state of Tennessee — an early adopter of this legislation — to roll out the platform to all public middle schools and high schools in the state. Its since been adopted in hundreds of schooldistricts in states across the country.
Now, the company is expanding its platform to include all subjects. Its new suite of AI agents will help fulfill the company's ultimate goal of personalizing the learning process — one that Pasinetti said is "almost impossible" today, given how understaffed schools are.
Subverting AI to make learning better
Ng has been at the forefront of AI and education. He's launched ed-tech companies like Coursera, and DeepLearning.AI — where his latest course "Vibe Coding 101" is available. In an interview with Forbes in 2014, he said that AI has the "potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery."
More than a decade later that notion has taken hold of the corporate world where workers are using AI to eliminate rote tasks like writing emails, analyzing data, and synthesizing research. However, what constitutes "mental drudgery" in the realm of education is less clear, especially as educators — and students — worry that the technology will make skills stagnate.
Kira, in some sense, is subverting the building blocks of generative AI to cut out the busywork and enhance the learning process.
The technology underlying AI is a "fundamentally discursive technology," Pasinetti said. While the methodical naturecan help students work through material through the Socratic method — enabling a back-and-forth dialogue — the issue is that it's also designed to deliver answers as quickly as possible, Pasinetti said. Several of the most popular generative AI chatbots are also in a race against Google to become the world's default search engine.
Kira's aim is to introduce"friction" into students' conversations with AI at the right stages so that they actually have a productive struggle and learn through the experience, Pasinetti explained.
In practice, that means Kira's platform can incrementally guide a student through a tough problem by calibrating itself to students' understanding of the subject.
Kira's agents use these insights to inform teachers about student capabilities by building knowledge maps to determine what students know and don't know across a subject.
Schools are getting tech-savvy
Kira's business model banks on classrooms' growing embrace of not only AI and data, but tech-enabled learning.
In recent years, schools have begun implementing "adaptive learning technology" which can collect and leverage data on students' performance, progress, and learning style to tailor the learning experience. This technology aims to increase equity across the classroom and help teachers and students use time more effectively.
That coincides with the widespread adoption of learning management systems during the pandemic. These are software programs that help educators design and manage online learning like Blackboard, Moodle, or TalentLMS. They surged in popularity in 2020 and 2021, according to EducationWeek.
According to EdWeek's survey of 1,000 school district leaders, principals, and teachers conducted in 2022, only 6% of educators said their school district didn't use an LMS. Schools can either integrate Kira into their existing LMS or use the platform as a standalone LMS.
Pasinetti said that by adopting Kira, schools can cut down on at least four to five pieces of software — often the most expensive ones.
Kira's leaders see AI overhauling relationship between students, teachers, and technology — which could lead to more meaningful changes down the road.
"This is a big shift that's happening, and especially if you don't have a subject matter expertise, you're kind of learning alongside your student," said Jagriti Agrawal, Kira's cofounder and vice president of artificial intelligence. "I think that that mindset could be a helpful one."
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ChemImage, a small biotech company based in Pittsburgh, is taking the global healthcare company Johnson & Johnson to federal court in Manhattan.
Daniel Hulshizer/AP
Johnson & Johnson executives are scheduled to take the stand in a trial that started Monday.
ChemImage, a small biotech firm, sued the healthcare giant over a 2019 partnership that went south.
Johnson & Johnson had signed a multibillion-dollar contract with the Pittsburgh-based company.
In 2019, Johnson & Johnson, hoping to compete in the growing surgical robotics field, signed a multibillion-dollar contract with a small biotech company called ChemImage.
Based in Pittsburgh, ChemImage was pioneering AI-powered software that a surgeon could use to "see" and interpret what a robotic scalpel is doing. The images would help the surgeon form real-time assessments of damaged or cancerous tissue.
On Monday, these former partners — the small biotech company and the global healthcare giant — began facing off in federal court in Manhattan at a trial over a $1.5 billion breach of contract lawsuit ChemImage filed last spring.
US District Judge Jesse Furman, who is presiding over the weeklong bench trial, has trimmed the allowable damages. If ChemImage prevails, it could still win some $180 million in contract-termination penalties and other overdue payments.
ChemImage has also asked the judge to restore all patents and intellectual property it developed under its contract with Johnson & Johnson. This would let the plaintiffs resume developing and monetizing their imaging software.
"This is a case about J&J's decision to retreat from its failed play in surgical robotics, breaking the promises it made to ChemImage to develop its life-saving imaging technology," the lawsuit alleges.
"J&J's decision ultimately killed this family-founded company and its technology that could have vastly improved surgical outcomes for millions of people."
What's undisputed in the case is that two days after Christmas in 2019, ChemImage and the J&J subsidiary Ethicon entered into a 104-page "Research, Development, License, and Commercialization Agreement."
The contract set a payment schedule — ChemImage received $7 million up front — and established milestones for future payments and as much as $1.5 billion in eventual royalties.
Also undisputed is that in April 2023 — with the effort to meld ChemImage's software and J&J's robotics mired in delay and no commercially viable product in sight — the contract blew up.
The judge is tasked with determining whether J&J pulled the contract for good reason — "with cause." If so, ChemImage would be entitled to no damages at all.
Alternately, if J&J pulled the contract for no valid reason — without cause — the healthcare company would have been required to give ChemImage a 120-day notice and a $40 million termination payment, neither of which happened.
ChemImage also alleges that an additional $140 million in incremental development "milestone" payments are due.
Much of the trial testimony will involve opposing accounts of why the partnership went south after three years.
J&J will present witnesses to show that the contract was terminated for cause, and so ChemImage does not deserve damages. In court papers, they allege that ChemImage failed to meet more than one developmental milestone after more than two years of work, and caused significant cost overruns.
"Plaintiff was harmed as a result of its own conduct," J&J's lawyers wrote in January.
ChemImage puts its founder on the stand
On Monday morning, ChemImage called the trial's first witness, Patrick Treado, who founded the imaging company in 1994. He testified that the imaging company was blindsided when reps of J&J subsidiary Ethicon announced two years ago that they were terminating the contract because development milestones had not been met.
"At no time were there concerns about the study designs that were not addressed," he said.
Ethicon had participated as partners every time its hardware was paired with ChemImage's AI-powered software in research surgeries on animals, Treado told the judge.
The surgeries were conducted in labs run by both ChemImage and J&J "at great expense," Treado said during cross-examination, referring to what he described as the high cost of treating the test animals ethically by conducting "non-survival surgeries."
"In my remarks, I indicated my opinion that there was no breach of the contract," he told the judge of a contentious April 7, 2023 meeting, during which J&J execs accused ChemImage of obscuring its failures through poor quality data.
ChemImage has said in court papers that development delays were caused by issues with J&J's own technology, employee turnover, and lack of engagement.
Nine current and former J&J executives are on the parties' witness lists, including Hani Abouhalka, the surgery chairman for the MedTech division, and Rocco De Bernardis, the global president of robotic and digital surgery. Peter Shen, the MedTech division's former global head of research, is also on the list.
ChemImage is also expected to call many of its own former executives, including its former CEO, Dr. Jeffrey Cohen, who, according to court documents, will be questioned about the imaging company's frequent requests to J&J for more funding and cash advances.
Cohen will testify that J&J "knowingly and maliciously" caused Ethicon to breach the contract, ChemImage's lawyers wrote in January.
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