Mathpresso, the Google-backed edtech company behind Asia's most used education app QANDA, has raised $8 million (10 billion Korean won) in a new funding round from Korean telecom giant KT Corporation. The latest funding round brings Mathpresso's total capital raised to about $130 million, with previous backers including Google, GGV Capital, Goodwater Capital, and SoftBank Ventures Asia.
Founded in 2015 by Ray Lee and Jake Lee, Seoul-based Mathpresso is on a mission to provide effective education for all. The company initially developed QANDA as a 1:1 Q&A service with top university tutors. Over time, it has evolved into a comprehensive educational platform, used by over 10 million monthly users and holding a top position in over 20 countries.
With the new funding, Mathpresso aims to accelerate the development of a large language model (LLM) specifically optimized for education. While LLMs like ChatGPT demonstrate advanced conversational abilities, their tendency for hallucination poses challenges for use in learning environments where accuracy is paramount.
To address this, Mathpresso will leverage its trove of proprietary education data and advanced AI capabilities, alongside KT's infrastructure and model expertise, to build a more robust and precise LLM. This includes over 6 billion QANDA user solution searches, teacher-student interaction data, advanced optical character recognition for math equations, and proprietary math-solving algorithms.
Mathpresso intends to incorporate the education-focused LLM into its AI tutor to provide personalized and highly effective learning support across its platforms. These include the flagship QANDA app, its 1:N online school QANDA Study, and 1:1 tutoring service QANDA Tutor. As a first step, Mathpresso launched Poly, a beta chatbot powered by LLM and OCR tech, on the QANDA app last month.
Beyond capturing Asia's largest share of learning app users, Mathpresso now aims to expand into the U.S. education market by year's end. The strategy involves leveraging English language data to refine its LLM for native speakers while attracting new users.
“This partnership marks a significant step towards building a world-class AI tutor beyond Asia,” said Jake Lee, CEO of Mathpresso. “Our AI tutor aims to offer unparalleled educational opportunities for countless students, setting a new standard for personalized learning.”
QANDA, Mathpresso's leading app, utilizes AI and advanced OCR to provide solutions and tailored learning content from photographed math problems and text. Since launching, it has amassed over 80 million registered users across 50 countries.