In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his household from Serbia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was getting ready to launch a Kickstarter marketing campaign for its sensible speaker. Every week earlier than the marketing campaign was alleged to go stay, Amazon launched its Echo sensible speaker, rendering Cubic.AI primarily useless within the water.
“It was a catastrophe,” Crewkov informed TechCrunch. “It made zero sense to compete with Amazon and Google; we ended up promoting the corporate [two years later].”
However the expertise wasn’t a complete loss. Transferring his household from Serbia to the U.S. meant placing his daughters, used to talking Russian at residence, into English-speaking faculties. His eldest daughter began working with an internet tutor, and when Crewkov realized that the tutor was studying scripted solutions, the thought behind his subsequent and present startup, Buddy.ai, was born.
“I simply realized that we might most likely create an AI character that may do the identical issues if classes are scripted,” Crewkov mentioned. “My daughter struggled; she was our first tester and our first person.”
Buddy.ai is an animated, multimodal, conversational character tutor meant to assist youngsters study English as a second language. The corporate works as a subscription app that customers can obtain. The corporate has additionally began working with faculties in international locations like Brazil as effectively.
Crewkov mentioned that regardless of their background working in voice-based AI, it was difficult to get the enterprise off the bottom. After they began, they thought they might be capable to get the product to market inside six months, a purpose Crewkov now refers to as “naive.” As an alternative, it took years.
As a result of the product is aimed toward youngsters, the corporate needed to navigate the Youngsters On-line Privateness Act (COPA) and comparable legal guidelines in different international locations. Plus, it’s a tricky downside to crack. The AI needed to be educated not simply to know human voice, however perceive youngsters’s voices talking in languages they didn’t absolutely know but.
“We try to know a 4-year-old Brazilian woman who’s making an attempt to say her first phrases in English on the similar time is a 4-year-old Arabic woman from Saudi Arabia,” Crewkov mentioned. “Fully totally different accents and fully totally different languages. We simply began gathering knowledge in international locations that there have been no hardcore regulation like COPA and educated the primary mannequin on that knowledge.”
However the firm prevailed, and now seven years later the corporate is approaching 55 million downloads and works with greater than 22 million college students yearly.
Buddy.ai simply raised a $11 million seed spherical led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from One Approach Ventures, J Ventures, and Point72 Ventures, amongst others.
Crewkov mentioned that fundraising for Buddy.ai was powerful from the start, and regardless of the rise of curiosity in AI, this spherical was nonetheless a slog. He mentioned they spoke to 186 traders to shut this seed spherical. BITKRAFT simply occurred to be the second agency they spoke to, and Crewkov mentioned that they had been the proper match for what his firm was doing.
“We had been particularly eager about discovering a fund with experience within the gaming area and that’s why we’re so in love with BITKRAFT,” Crewkov mentioned. “Youngsters deal with Buddy as a sport. A enjoyable reality is a lot of the downloads are literally made by youngsters who simply need to play with buddy.”
The corporate plans to speculate the entire capital into product improvement. Crewkov mentioned that regardless of the corporate’s age and traction, to this point he considers the tech to be fairly underdeveloped. Buddy.ai plans to rent a head of sport design and a head of UX design with this newest spherical.
Crewkov added {that a} huge push for the corporate is so as to add on extra languages and proceed to construct out its relationships with faculties.
Buddy.ai just isn’t the one firm wanting to make use of AI characters to assist individuals follow a brand new language. Univerbal is one other that has raised $2 million in enterprise capital. Loora has raised $21.3 million. Buddy.ai’s strategy of specializing in youngsters studying English as a second language helps it stand out.
“We simply imagine that the longer term is hybrid the place AI tutors and AI brokers can actually assist academics,” Crewkov mentioned. “You simply want to supply loads of follow, follow every day. We’ll by no means had sufficient academics to do this, it’s the prefect purposes to AI.”
