Co-founder Sell their last startup anchor to Spotify Launching their next project: Oukoe, an AI-powered educational application that allows anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses for nearly all topics of their choice by simply typing a prompt.
These courses can cover a variety of vertical fields including topics such as science, history, foreign languages, news, popular culture, preparing for changes in life. At release, the oboe (name inspired by the root of the Japanese word meaning “learning”) will offer nine different course formats. These allow users to learn in their preferred way, Ooe co-founder Nir Zicherman Explain to TechCrunch.
Zicherman founded the company with Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano After leaving Spotify in October 2023, it took a while to recharge. Zicherman said he was inspired to work on AI education products after working to expand Spotify’s audiobook business, which makes it easier for people to access high-quality and educational content because it is bundled with music subscriptions.
Unlike AI chatbots, you don’t have to have a back and forth conversation to learn with the oboe. Instead, you can choose from text and visual effects, audio courses, games, interactive tests, and more.
For those who want to learn on the go, the oboe offers two audio formats. One feels more like listening to a college-style presentation, while the other is similar to Google’s podcast-style notebook LM, as it has two hosts on the topic.
“The real magic here comes from the internal architecture we build, and I describe it as a complex, multi-agent architecture we build from scratch, each part curated in parallel as we generate courses,” Zicherman said.
“The challenge is how do you create courses that are both high-quality and personalized, fully personalize what users want to see, and also generate very quickly? It all happens in seconds,” he said.
He added: “Our agents are also responsible for scripting from developing course architectures to developing and validating the basic materials taught, scripting for podcasts, drawing real images from the Internet, rather than AI-generated images, but real images and visual effects.”
Some agents of the oboe review content to ensure courses are accurate, high-quality and personalized what users want to learn.
The courses themselves are lightweight, engaging, and even fun. Plus, the Ooe’s team is developing a recommendation engine that will help you continually discuss a topic if you prefer. This gives users whether they want to gain surface-level knowledge about new topics or whether they want to gain more in-depth knowledge.
The team believes that this will be combined with various formats and will help the oboe to a wider audience.
“For me, education thinks of more formal academic environments and the types of normative courses students are used to when they grow up,” Zicherman told TechCrunch. “But the truth is that we are lifelong learners… a lot of our time on the internet these days is trying to better understand things, but the truth is that the internet is about attracting our attention rather than teaching effectively.”
“We are excited to build a platform that aims to be a one-stop shop with inherent desires,” he said.
At startup, users can eat any courses created by others for free and can create up to five free courses per month. After that, there are two paid levels: Ooe Plus, which offers 30 additional courses per month, while two-way professionals offer 100 courses for $40 per month.
The service will be available first on the web (and mobile networks), but native apps for iOS and Android are on the way.
Ooe is a five full-time team including Zicherman. Mignano remains a full-time partner at VC Firm Lightspeed, but sits on the oboe board and shares the co-founder title.
The startup’s $4 million seed round is led by Eniac Ventures, a venture capital firm that leads anchor seeds. The round also includes investments from Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss and Matt Lieber.
