A landmark study by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found “90% of tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20% of the control class”. The real-life impact of this gap is to exacerbate inequality. Well-off students able to access one-on-one tutoring will perform better than classmates who learn in large groups. It’s a problem in Western societies, with wealth inequality inhibiting social mobility. It also hits hundreds of millions of students in developing economies, who miss out on the educational advantages many of their counterparts in richer nations take for granted. Enter Karttikeya Mangalam, CEO and co-founder of SigIQ.ai, who believes artificial intelligence can begin to redress this balance. He and co-founder Kurt Keutzer have developed an AI tutor they claim can deliver one-to-one teaching of the same quality as a human educator, but at a fraction of the price. SigIQ, which is today announcing that it has raised $9.5 million of new funding, aims to offer this tutor to as many students who need it.
