Sizzle AI raises $7.5M
A personalized tutor for every learner
Public Data
Company: Sizzle AI
Press Release: Business Insider
Market (geography): US
Market (industry verticals): Tutoring
Customer demographic: US Middle and High School STEM Courses
Leadership Team: Jerome Perenti, Vijay Koduri
Investors: Owl Ventures, 8VC
Business in brief: San Francisco-based Sizzle endeavors to build the leading AI platform for personalized learning. Led by Meta’s former VP of AI, the company will start with a focus on question-and-answer tools for K12 STEM courses before expanding to other topics of inquiry inside and out of the traditional education system
Public business data:
90% accuracy rate on queries
Public app launch in August 2023 (too soon to measure users)
ETCH Assessment
Bull case: The size of the market for a personalized learning assistant is enormous. Though the company faces stiff domestic competition (see below), there is almost no limit on it if the company is able to successfully serve users from the start of their formal education through their professional careers.
Further, Sizzle’s founder and founding teams is one of the best-equipped company leaders to steward a large-scale adoption of AI products, having been Meta’s VP of AI during the R&D phase of most of today’s cutting-edge AI models.
Bear case: Sizzle’s initial value proposition, answering student questions, is one of the most competitive markets in education - featuring industry heavyweights such as Chegg, Learneo, Study.com, Khan Academy, and Photomath as well as upstarts like Kira Learning and Atypical AI. For better or for worse, both the AI and Education industries have historically favored distribution-led rather than product-led approaches to adoption, which tend to favor large incumbents.
Additionally, while the Sizzle team has substantial experience in Big Tech, including building consumer-oriented companies, they launched without a full-time expert in education (though it does have strong education advisors). This type of experience will likely be of increasing importance as the company tries to bridge the gap from 90% correct answers to ~100% - a bar which Sizzle’s large incumbent competitors all meet (albeit at a much higher cost base).
In the company’s words:
We wrote this post using the information publicly available to the ETCH team. If you are a member of the Sizzle leadership team, we welcome your feedback! We will update this post to include any commentary you feel appropriate in this section.
Email matt@etch.club for more information
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