Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand new users joining daily. These are some solid numbers for a startup called Turbo AI launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, two 20-year-old college dropouts.
Most of this growth has come in the past six months, the founders tell TechCrunch, during which their AI-powered note-taking and study tool grew from one million to five million users, while remaining profitable.
They say the idea for Turbo stemmed from a classroom problem many college students face, which is trying to take notes while paying attention to a lecture at the same time.
“I would always struggle with taking notes because I just couldn’t both listen to the teacher and write at the same time. I just couldn’t do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every time I tried to take notes, I’d stop paying attention. And when I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I was like, what if I could use AI?”
So the pair built Turbolearn as a side project to allow them to record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They began sharing it with friends, then it spread to classmates across Duke and Northwestern, where they were enrolled until dropping out this year. Within months, the app had reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the usual note-taker formula—record, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive with study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, along with a built-in chat assistant that explains key terms or concepts.
However, recordings in large halls often pick up background noise, so the founders built features that allow students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos, or readings instead. That’s now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.
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