Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand new users join us daily. Those are solid numbers for a startup called Turbo AI launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, two 20-year-old college dropouts.
Most of this growth has occurred in the last six months, the founders tell TechCrunch, during which their AI-powered note-taking and study tool grew from one million to five million users, while remaining profitable.
They say the idea for Turbo stems from a classroom problem many students face, which involves trying to take notes while paying attention to a lecture at the same time.
“I always had trouble taking notes because I just couldn’t listen to the professor and write at the same time. I just couldn’t do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “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 the two created Turbolearn as a side project to allow them to record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards and quizzes. They started sharing it with friends, and then it spread to their classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where they were 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, as well as a built-in discussion assistant that explains key terms or concepts.
However, recordings in large rooms often pick up 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 download a 30-page course and spend two hours answering 75 quiz questions in a row. You won’t do that unless it really works,” Dhawan said, noting that students like the way the product saves them time and helps them retain information.
However, it’s not just students who use Turbo AI, as evidenced by the name change from Turbolearn (a study app) to Turbo AI (an AI note taker and learning assistant). Professionals have also adopted it, including consultants, lawyers, doctors and even analysts from Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, for example, download reports and use Turbo to generate summaries or convert them into podcasts they can listen to during their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since college and have collaborated on several projects over the years.
Dhawan previously created UMax, an advice app that promised to make people more attractive and reached the top spot on 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.
Creating viral apps is a rare skill. But despite the scale of their previous projects, the founders only felt the need to abandon Turbo because they saw it as an opportunity to build a sustainable business.
Yet unlike many fast-growing AI companies, they are reluctant to raise too much money too soon, having only raised $750,000 last year.
“We’ve brought this up before, we’ve had a lot of traction. Since then we’ve had a lot of interest, but we’re taking our time because our cash flow is positive and we’ve been profitable throughout our life as a company,” said Arora, who added that his team of 15 is based in Los Angeles and strives to stay close to the student and maker communities at universities like UCLA.
Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders say they are exploring other pricing options to reflect students’ sensitivity to price, even as the app expands beyond the target group. “Right now, we’re experimenting with other pricing and doing 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 takers like Otter or Fireflies. Users can let the AI take notes or write alongside, the founders say. This approach has allowed Turbo to stand out even as competitors like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn target similar student audiences.
“The cool thing now is that when students think of an AI-powered note-taking or study tool, we are the first to think,” Dhawan said.
