Private AI tutors help exams
According to foreign media TechCrunch, South Korean AI education company Riiid has received US$175 million in financing from the SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund, bringing the startup’s total financing to US$250 million. It is reported that Riiid plans to use this financing to enter the international market and expand its product range.
Riiid was established in Seoul, South Korea in 2017. It aims to use AI intelligence to analyze data, provide users with customized learning plans and learning suggestions, and create a deeply personalized learning experience. Riiid enters the public view mainly through the application Santa, which is an exam preparation application for users in non-English speaking countries. It is used to practice and prepare for the TOEIC English proficiency test. It has more than 2.5 million users in South Korea and Japan.
Santa is a multi-platform English intelligent tutoring system. The AI tutor in the system can provide users with one-to-one online English teaching. On the Santa platform, Riiid uses proprietary AI technology to further analyze student data and learning content, predict test scores and user behavior, and provide personalized learning plan suggestions in real time to help students optimize their learning potential. According to the Santa report, 20 hours of English learning can increase the TOEIC score of users by an average of 124 points.
Picture source: corporate website
The company’s CEO YJ Jang said: “As the current global epidemic situation tends to be normalized, the application of AI online education is now more important than ever.” According to statistics, affected by the new crown epidemic, all Among the 700,000 education and training institutions in China, about one-third of them have successively transformed to online survival. Even when the epidemic situation in China continues to be stable, the online + offline teaching model will still become the development trend of the education industry in the future.
Riiid has also been cooperating with third-party companies and organizations to extend its AI technology to the preparation of other standardized exams. These include preparing for the GMAT test for Korean students; cooperating with ConnecME, a customized education service company, to help students in Egypt, UAE, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Jordan prepare for the ACT test; and preparing for university entrance exams for Latin American students.
At the same time, Riiid has been developing related applications for vocational education. In South Korea, users can use Santa Realtor prepares for the real estate agent exam and insurance agent exam.
In the future, Riiid will also be committed to providing “lifelong learning” support solutions for the education market, helping users achieve their learning goals through continuous evaluation and performance feedback throughout the learning process, and fostering users’ continuity in learning Enthusiasm and the idea of creating lifelong learning, rather than just providing preparation education for specific exams.