In 2014, Ivan Crewkov moved his family from Siberia to the U.S. as his startup, Cubic.AI, was preparing to launch a Kickstarter campaign for its smart speaker. Every week before the campaign was alleged to go live, Amazon launched its Echo smart speaker, rendering Cubic.AI essentially dead within the water.
“It was a disaster,” Crewkov told TechCrunch. “It made zero sense to compete with Amazon and Google; we ended up selling the corporate [two years later].”
However the experience wasn’t a complete loss. Moving his family from Siberia to the U.S. meant putting his daughters, used to speaking Russian at home, into English-speaking schools. His eldest daughter began working with a web based tutor, and when Crewkov realized that the tutor was reading scripted answers, the thought behind his next and current startup, Buddy.ai, was born.
“I just realized that we could probably create an AI character that will do the identical things if lessons are scripted,” Crewkov said. “My daughter struggled; she was our first tester and our first user.”
Buddy.ai is an animated, multimodal, conversational character tutor meant to assist children learn English as a second language. The corporate works as a subscription app that customers can download. The corporate has also began working with schools in countries like Brazil as well.
Crewkov said that despite their background working in voice-based AI, it was difficult to get the business off the bottom. After they began, they thought they’d find a way to get the product to market inside six months, a goal Crewkov now refers to as “naive.” As an alternative, it took years.
Since the product is geared toward children, the corporate needed to navigate the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) and similar laws in other countries. Plus, it’s a tricky problem to crack. The AI needed to be trained not only to grasp human voice but to also understand children’s voices speaking in languages they didn’t fully know yet.
“We are attempting to grasp a 4-year-old Brazilian girl who’s attempting to say her first words in English similtaneously a 4-year-old Arabic girl from Saudi Arabia,” Crewkov said. “Completely different accents and completely different languages. We just began collecting data in countries [where] there have been no hardcore [regulations] like COPPA and trained the primary model on that data.”
But the corporate prevailed, and now seven years later it’s approaching 55 million downloads and works with greater than 22 million students annually.
Buddy.ai just raised an $11 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures with participation from One Way Ventures, J Ventures, and Point72 Ventures, amongst others.
Crewkov said that fundraising for Buddy.ai was tough from the start, and despite the rise of interest in AI, this round was still a slog. He said they spoke to 186 investors to shut this seed round. BITKRAFT just happened to be the second firm they spoke to, and Crewkov said that they were the right fit for what his company was doing.
“We were specifically thinking about finding a fund with expertise within the gaming field and that’s why we’re so in love with BITKRAFT,” Crewkov said. “Children treat Buddy as a game. A fun fact is many of the downloads are literally made by children who just need to play with buddy.”
The corporate plans to speculate all the capital into product development. Crewkov said that despite the corporate’s age and traction, so far he considers the tech to be pretty underdeveloped. Buddy.ai plans to rent a head of game design and a head of UX design with this latest round.
Crewkov added that an enormous push for the corporate is so as to add on more languages and proceed to construct out its relationships with schools.
Buddy.ai is just not the one company seeking to use AI characters to assist people practice a brand new language. Univerbal is one other that has raised $2 million in enterprise capital. Loora has raised $21.3 million. Buddy.ai’s approach of specializing in children learning English as a second language helps it stand out.
“We just imagine that the long run is hybrid where AI tutors and AI agents can really help teachers,” Crewkov said. “You only need to supply a variety of practice, practice every day. We are going to never [have] enough teachers to try this; it’s the prefect applications to AI.”
