5 million users. 8-digit annual recurring revenue. 20,000,000 new users join every day. These are solid numbers for a startup called Turbo AI, launched in early 2024 by 20-year-old college dropouts Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan.
Most of this growth has happened in the past six months, founders told TechCrunch, during which time the company’s AI-powered note-taking and learning tool grew from 1 million to 5 million users while turning a profit.
They say the idea for Turbo came from a classroom problem many college students face: trying to pay attention to lectures and take notes at the same time.
“I always had trouble taking notes because I couldn’t listen to the teacher and write at the same time. I couldn’t do that,” CEO Dhawan said. “Every time I tried to take notes, I stopped paying attention. And when I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I thought, what if I could use AI?”
So they built Turbolearn as a side project that allows them to record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They started sharing it with friends, then spread it to their classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where they stayed until dropping out this year. Within months, the app spread to other universities, including Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The product takes the common note-taking techniques of record, transcribe, and summarize, and offers interactivity with study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, along with a built-in chat assistant to explain key terms and concepts.
However, recordings in large halls often pick up background noise, so the founders built a feature that allows students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos, or readings instead. This is currently a more common use case than recording live lectures.
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“Students upload a 30-page lecture and spend two hours solving 75 quizzes in a row. We don’t do that unless it actually makes a difference,” Dhawan said, noting that students like that the product saves them time and helps them retain information.
But students aren’t the only ones using Turbo AI. This is reflected in the name change from Turbolearn (learning app) to Turbo AI (AI note-taker and learning assistant). The founders say the method is also used by professionals such as consultants, lawyers, doctors and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. For example, some people upload reports and use Turbo to generate summaries or turn them into podcasts that they can listen to on their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have collaborated on multiple projects over the years.
Dhawan previously built UMax, an advice app that promised to make people more engaging, reaching No. 1 in the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million in annual revenue. Arora, on the other hand, specializes in using social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract millions of users.
Building a viral app is a rare skill. But despite the size of the project to date, the founders felt the need to drop out of Turbo only because they saw an opportunity to build a lasting business.
Still, unlike many fast-growing AI companies, the company is wary of raising too much money too early, having raised just $750,000 last year.
“We raised this amount before we had much traction. Since then, we’ve seen an uptick in inbound interest, but we’re cash flow positive and have been profitable as a company all along, so we’re taking our time,” Arora said, adding that the 15-person team is based in Los Angeles and focused on working closely with student and creative communities at universities like UCLA.
Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders said they are considering other pricing options to reflect student price sensitivities, even as the app expands beyond its target demographic. “We are currently experimenting with other pricing 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 note-taking tools like Otter and Fireflies. According to the founders, users can have the AI take notes and write alongside it. This approach has helped Turbo stand out from competitors like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn, which target similar student audiences.
“The great thing right now is that when students think of AI note takers and AI learning tools, we are the first thing that comes to mind,” Dhawan says.
