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SigIQ founders Kurt Keutzer and Karttikeya Mangalam
Students who receive one-to-one tuition perform better than those who learn in large classes. That seems an obvious statement, but the size of the advantage that one-to-one learners enjoy may surprise you; the 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 , 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.
“It has always felt deeply unfair to me that this massive divide exists in terms of access to education in different parts of the world,” says Mangalam. “Google has solved the inequalities in access to information that used to exist; we want to do the same thing for education.”
The venture is a deeply personal one for Mangalam, who grew up in Bihar, a particularly poor part of India. Defying the odds, he won a series of scholarships that gave him access to high-quality education in India – and later to Stanford and Berkeley in the US – before working in research roles at organisations including Google, Meta and OpenAI. “I am where I am because I spent a lot of time in the best places being tutored by the best people,” he says. “Most people don’t get that opportunity.”
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