One-on-one tutoring helps students achieve greater academic results that lead to more opportunities in work and life, often by more than two standard deviations compared to the average untutored student. However, access to personalized tutoring is unaffordable for the vast majority of students globally. Many have tried to solve this so-called “two sigma” problem, but it’s a hard nut to crack.
Enter SigIQ, a startup with breakthrough GenAI solutions democratizing personalized learning and reducing inequality in education. Calibrate is thrilled to announce our investment in the pre-seed round in SigIQ as they come out of stealth with a $9.5 million seed round.
SigIQ’s unique vision and deep expertise in AI make it a standout in Ed Tech. The company develops highly personalized yet cost-effective AI tutors by leveraging unique GenAI technology. SigIQ’s AI tutors assess each student’s current level of understanding on a subject and then create individualized learning plans. AI tutors also evaluate students’ progress and can interact in real-time with students.
So far, more than 200,000 students in India have used SigIQ’s AI tutor, PadhAI, to help them study for the country’s civil service exams, which the AI tutors can, for the first time, pass with flying colors. A growing number of students also use SigIQ’s EverTutor to prep for the GRE required by graduate schools in North America.
SigIQ was founded in 2023 by Karttikeya “Kartik” Mangalam and renowned UC Berkeley computer science professor Kurt Keutzer, who co-founded DeepScale, which Tesla later acquired. Kartik has extensive experience in AI. Prior to co-founding SigIQ, Kartik worked as a research scientist at FAIR and Google Deepmind.
Kartik and I have a long history, he is a former student of mine at Stanford, and we collaborated on one of the most cited trajectory prediction papers in self-driving cars. Now at SigIQ, he is tackling a much longer and more complicated type of trajectories: learning trajectories!
Kartik got the idea for SigIQ from his own journey, growing up in a small town in India with very limited resources. Classes had 60+ students and personalized learning was practically non-existent, but Kartik’s strong drive to learn made him a stellar student. He received scholarships to both Stanford and UC Berkeley, where he received a PhD in AI. He is now helping every student reach this level of academic and personal success with SigIQ.SigIQ has a special place in my heart as a father, professor, AI practitioner, and VC. I am excited to welcome SigIQ to the Calibrate family!