20-year-old dropouts created Turbo AI Notebook and grew it to 5 million users

Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand latest users join us every day. These are some solid numbers for a startup called Turbo Artificial Intelligence launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora AND Sarthak Dhawantwo 20-year-olds who dropped out of faculty.

The founders tell TechCrunch that the majority of that growth has occurred over the past six months, during which their AI-powered note-taking and learning tool has grown from one million to five million users while remaining profitable.

They say that the idea for Turbo got here from a problem that many students face in the classroom, namely the need to take notes and focus on the lecture at the same time.

(*5*) said CEO Dhawan. “Every time I tried to take notes, I stopped paying attention. And when I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I wondered what if I could use artificial intelligence?”

So the two created Turbolearn as a side project to allow them to record lectures and routinely generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They began sharing it with friends, and then it spread to classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where they were enrolled until they graduated this yr. Within months, the application reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.

The product takes the usual note-taking formula – record, transcribe, summarize – and makes it interactive with study notes, quizzes and flashcards, in addition to a built-in chat assistant that explains key terms and concepts.

However, recordings in large rooms often pick up background noise, so the founders created features that as an alternative allow students to upload PDF files, lectures, YouTube videos or readings. This is now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.

“Students submit a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going through 75 quiz questions in a row. You don’t do that if it doesn’t really work,” Dhawan said, noting that students love how the product saves time and helps them retain information.

But it’s not only students who profit from Turbo AI – as reflected in the name change from Turbolearn (learning app) to Turbo AI (AI-based notebook and learning assistant). It has also been adopted by professionals, including consultants, lawyers, doctors and even Goldman Sachs and McKinsey analysts, the founders say. For example, some people upload reports and use Turbo to generate summaries or convert them into podcasts that could be listened to on the way to work.

Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have collaborated on many projects over the years.

Dhawan previously created UMax, a consulting app that promised to make people more attractive and reached number one in the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million in annual revenue. Meanwhile, Arora specializes in using social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract tens of millions of users.

Creating viral applications is a rare skill. However, despite the scale of their previous projects, the founders felt the need to abandon Turbo only because they saw an opportunity to build a lasting business.

Still, unlike many fast-growing AI firms, they are wary of raising too much money too soon, having raised just $750,000 last yr.

“We raised this issue before we had a lot of traction. We’ve had a lot of interest since then, but we took our time because we’re cash flow positive and we’ve been profitable the entire time as a company,” Arora said, adding that their 15-person team is based in Los Angeles and focuses on staying close to communities of scholars and creators at universities like UCLA.

Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders say they are exploring other pricing options to reflect students’ price sensitivity, whilst the app scales beyond its target market. “We are currently experimenting with different pricing and doing a lot of A/B testing to see what works,” Arora added.

Turbo AI sits between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated note-taking tools like Otter and Fireflies. The developers say users can let the AI ​​take notes or write alongside it. This approach has helped Turbo stand out whilst competitors like Y Combinator-powered YouLearn goal similar student audiences.

“What’s cool now is that when students think of a notebook or an artificial intelligence research tool, that’s the first thing that comes to mind,” Dhawan said.