Riiid, a South Korean AI Tutoring Platform, Raises $18 Million in Series C

The Seoul-based Riiid announced on July 15 that it had raised $15 million in Series C funding. The round includes previous investors DSC Investments, along with other VCs including Apenroute Asset Management, Premiere Partners, IMM Investment, and Korea Growth Investment Corporation.

Riiid has developed an AI-powered adaptive personalized learning authoring technology as a B2B service. Their flagship product is known as santA.Inside. It was developed by a team of 30 researchers, and the company has set forward with a strategy to invest heavily in their research division. The Riiid team formed the first Korean group to present at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference.

The Latest Series C Brings Riiid to $31.3 Million to Date

The latest funding round brings their total VC investment to $31.3 million. The company says they have no plans to alter their strategy, and that the latest round will go towards further R&D with santA.Inside.

Riiid’s strategy has been to forego a focus on content and instead develop the technology to deliver it.

“Riiid will transform the paradigm of the educational industry from a content-centered one to a technology-centered one,” said company CEO Young-Jun Jang in a news release. “By entrusting the operation of complicated AI technologies to us, the educational companies that partner with Riiid will be able to focus their energy and attention on developing outstanding content. We will also do everything we can to help customers study various types of excellent content effectively via AI-based predictive algorithms. With our unique AI tutoring solution, Riiid has already started showing consumers that we can change the paradigm of the existing private school market, which is notoriously expensive and inefficient. Through more aggressive R&D investments, we are planning to expand our services to other types of tests, including the SAT and Korean civil service examination, as well as into overseas edutech markets.”

Moving Forward with a Focus on R&D

The technology has already been applied to the Test of English for International Communications (TOEIC). The Santa TOEIC study tool has already been used by 900,000 English learners. The company says they can accurately predict a student’s score after they answer between six and ten questions. To do this, researchers fed over 100 million data points into the algorithm.

(The use of adaptive AI tutoring solutions has increasingly been put to use not just as a means to deliver content as-needed in the absence of an instructor. It has also shown strong abilities to predict the readiness of a test candidates score.)

“Riiid is using AI technology that has already been internationally recognized and is gaining recognition in the market with its remarkable products,” said Principal of Premier Partners’ venture fund David Oh. “We followed through with this investment based on the fact that AI tutoring technology can be applied to diverse educational areas simultaneously and in parallel and because we believe that Riiid will be able to consistently lead the innovation of the global educational market.”

The latest research from the Riiid team was published on arXiv.org on June 26. “Creating a Neural Pedagogical Agent by Jointly Learning to Review and Assess” was authored by lead author Youngnam Lee and eight others and presents the company’s latest findings.

Featured Image: Sunyu Kim, Unsplash.