5 million customers. Eight-figure annual recurring income. Twenty thousand new customers becoming a member of day by day. These are some stable numbers for a startup referred to as Turbo AI launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, two 20-year-old school dropouts.
Most of this development has come up to now six months, the founders inform iinfoai, throughout which their AI-powered note-taking and research software grew from a million to 5 million customers, whereas remaining worthwhile.
They are saying the thought for Turbo stemmed from a classroom downside many school college students face, which is making an attempt to take notes whereas taking note of a lecture on the similar time.
“I’d all the time wrestle with taking notes as a result of I simply couldn’t each take heed to the instructor and write on the similar time. I simply couldn’t do it,” stated CEO Dhawan. “Each time I attempted to take notes, I’d cease paying consideration. And once I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I used to be like, what if I might use AI?”
So the pair constructed Turbolearn as a aspect undertaking to permit them to file lectures and robotically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They started sharing it with buddies, then it unfold to classmates throughout Duke and Northwestern, the place they had been enrolled till dropping out this 12 months. Inside months, the app had reached different universities, together with Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the same old note-taker system—file, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive with research notes, quizzes, and flashcards, together with a built-in chat assistant that explains key phrases or ideas.
Nonetheless, recordings in giant halls usually choose up background noise, so the founders constructed options that enable college students to add PDFs, lectures, YouTube movies, or readings as an alternative. That’s now a extra frequent use case than reside lecture recordings.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“College students will add a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going by way of 75 quiz questions in a row. You don’t do this except it’s actually working,” stated Dhawan, noting that college students love how the product saves time and helps them retain info.
It’s not simply college students utilizing Turbo AI, although—as mirrored by the title change from Turbolearn (a research app) to Turbo AI (an AI notetaker and studying assistant). Professionals have adopted it too, together with consultants, attorneys, docs, and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, for example, add reviews and use Turbo to generate summaries or convert them into podcasts they will take heed to on their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been buddies since center college and have collaborated on a number of tasks over time.
Dhawan beforehand constructed UMax, an recommendation app that promised to make individuals extra engaging and reached #1 on the App Retailer with 20 million customers and $6 million in annual income. Arora, in the meantime, makes a speciality of utilizing social media methods to drive explosive development and entice thousands and thousands of customers.
Constructing viral apps is a uncommon ability. However regardless of the dimensions of their earlier tasks, the founders solely felt the necessity to drop out for Turbo as a result of they noticed a possibility to construct a long-lasting enterprise.
Nonetheless, in contrast to many fast-growing AI firms, they’re cautious about elevating an excessive amount of cash too early, having taken in solely $750,000 final 12 months.
“We raised that earlier than we had loads of traction. Since then, we’ve had loads of inbound curiosity, however we’re taking our time as a result of we’re cash-flow optimistic and have been worthwhile our whole time as an organization,” stated Arora, who added that their 15-person group is predicated in Los Angeles and targeted on staying near scholar and creator communities at schools like UCLA.
College students pay about $20 a month for the product, however the founders say they’re exploring different pricing choices to replicate the value sensitivity of scholars, even because the app scales past the goal group. “Proper now, we’re experimenting with different pricing and operating loads of A/B exams to see what works,” Arora added.
Turbo AI sits between absolutely guide instruments like Google Docs and absolutely automated note-takers like Otter or Fireflies. Customers can let the AI take notes or write alongside it, the founders say. That strategy has helped Turbo stand out at the same time as rivals like Y Combinator–backed YouLearn goal comparable scholar audiences.
“What’s cool now’s that when college students consider an AI notetaker or AI research software, we’re the primary ones that come to thoughts,” Dhawan stated.
