Gizmo, a generative AI learning startup that uses gamified quizzes to engage learners, today announced $3.5 million in seed funding from NFX, Ada Ventures, and Capital T. The company will use the funding to scale its platform globally, hire more engineers and roll out new features.
Gizmo generates quizzes from a user’s class notes, which can either be copied and pasted into the platform or the AI can pull out information from PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, web pages, or even a YouTube video. There are also options to import notes from other flashcard tools like Quizlet and Anki.
The company told TechCrunch that the LLM models used to generate quizzes from users’ content are proprietary.
Additionally, users can give the AI a topic to generate a deck of notecards from scratch. Users can share a private link to their decks, which could be useful for classmates looking to study the same information together or teachers who want to create decks for their students. There’s also a marketplace for public decks where users share their flashcards with others.
Once a user creates a deck, Gizmo prepares a multiple-choice quiz based on the material. The quizzes use learning science techniques such as active recall and spaced repetition, the company explains, making learning easier and “super efficient.”
“Memory is critical for all forms of learning, but people forget 90% of what they learn,” said Petros Christodoulou, co-founder and CEO of Gizmo. “Generative AI is enabling us to create new ways to help people remember everything they learn in a fun and engaging way and that is why we started Gizmo.”
Like the language learning app Duolingo, Gizmo uses daily streaks to help keep users engaged. Every day, users have to answer a certain number of questions in order to achieve their streak for the day. There’s also a leaderboard where a user can see quiz grades and how they rank against their friends.
“We have some users on 365+ day streaks,” Christodoulou told us. He previously worked at Amazon as a machine learning researcher.
Plus, Gizmo gives users 15 lives every day, so when a user gets a quiz question wrong, they lose a life. Once they run out of lives, users can wait 10 minutes to get more, or they’re prompted to pay a monthly fee to get unlimited lives. Paying the subscription also lets them create unlimited AI-generated quizzes instead of 10 per day. The subscription is $8.80 per month or $52.80 per year.
Gizmo plans to launch three new features over the next three months, including a note-taking feature so users can type notes right on the platform, a collaboration feature where users can quiz and study together and the ability to ask the AI questions directly.
Gizmo was founded in 2021 by three Cambridge University alumni with experience across machine learning, marketing, teaching, edtech, product and data — Christodoulou, Paul Evangelou (CPO) and Robin Jack (CTO).
The company hopes that its gamified experience makes learning fun and that Gizmo becomes “as addictive as going on TikTok,” Christodoulou said.
Gizmo boasts over 300,000 users. The company says it’s growing 50% month-over-month “mainly through word of mouth.” Gizmo is available on the web and on iOS and Android devices.
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