Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand new users sign up every day. These are some solid numbers for a startup called Turbo AI released in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawantwo 20 year old college dropouts.
Most of that growth has come in the past six months, the founders tell TechCrunch, during which the AI-powered note-taking and studying tool grew from one million to five million users while remaining profitable.
They say the idea for Turbo came from a classroom problem many students face, which is trying to take notes while paying attention to a lecture.
“I always had a hard time taking notes because I just couldn’t listen to the teacher and write at the same time. I just couldn’t do it,” CEO Dhawan said. “Every time I tried to take notes, I stopped paying attention. And when I was listening, I couldn’t take notes. I thought, what if I could use artificial intelligence?”
So the pair created Turbolearn as a side project to let them record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards and quizzes. They started sharing it with friends, and then it spread to classmates throughout Duke and Northwestern, where they enrolled until dropping out this year. Within months, the app had reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the usual note-taking 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 rooms often cause background noise, so the founders created features that allow students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos or readings. This is now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.
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“Students will upload a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going over 75 quiz questions in a row. You don’t do that unless it actually works,” Dhawan said, noting that students love how the product saves time and helps them retain information.
But it’s not just students who are using Turbo AI — as reflected in the name change from Turbolearn (study app) to Turbo AI (AI notebook and learning assistant). It has also been adopted by professionals, including consultants, lawyers, doctors and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, for example, upload reports and use Turbo to create summaries or turn them into podcasts that they can listen to on the go.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since high school and have collaborated on several projects over the years.
Dhawan previously built UMax, an advice app that promised to make people more attractive, and it reached No. 1 on the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million in annual revenue. Arora, meanwhile, specializes in using social media strategies to explode growth and attract millions of users.
Creating viral apps is a rare skill. But despite the scale of their previous projects, the founders felt the need to leave Turbo only because they saw an opportunity to build a permanent business.
However, unlike many fast-growing AI companies, it is cautious about raising too much money too soon, having only raised $750,000 last year.
“We listed it before we had much traction. Since then, we’ve had a lot of inbound interest, but we’re taking our time because we’re cash-flow positive and have been profitable our entire time as a company,” said Arora, who added that the 15-person team is based in Los Angeles and focused on staying close to students and creators in ULAC communities.
Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders say they are exploring other pricing options to reflect students’ price sensitivity, even as the app scales beyond its target audience. “Right now, we’re experimenting with other values and running a lot of A/B testing to see what works,” Arora added.
Turbo AI sits between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated notes like Otter or Fireflies. Users can let the AI take notes or write alongside them, the founders say. This approach has helped Turbo stand out even as competitors like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn target a similar student audience.
“What’s cool now is that when students think of an AI notebook or an AI study tool, we’re the first thing that comes to mind,” Dhawan said.
