Why We Invested in Kyros.ai: AI-powered College Prep Platform
Powered by artificial intelligence, Kyros provides a one-stop platform to support students with their college preparation and application process. In the post-social media era, we believe that AI and big data have a chance to disrupt eduction globally.
“The Kyros product matrix, which includes course planning, test prep, application management, and other cool features, is backed by an experienced founding team. Both Rebecca Ye, the CEO, and Lingkun Chu, the CTO, worked with me years ago at Google. Trained as an engineer, Rebecca has very extensive experience working with both products and business development at Google Cloud, and previously co-founded Xcalar. Before I joined Google in 2000, Lingkun was my labmate in my Ph.D. program at the UC Santa Barbara, and he later on became manager at Google and former VP of engineering at ask.com.
When I learned Rebecca and Lingkun started Kyros.ai, I immediately got why they were doing this as we all felt the same pain when we were raising children. Our current education system has much room for improvement, and many high school students and their parents are struggling with the confusing process and fierce competition due to a lack of resources or tools. Kyros.ai plans to solve it with the power of artificial intelligence, and is trying to make the college preparation and application process affordable and accessible for everyone. This approach fits well with Amino’s investment theme, which is using data and machine learning to make people’s lives better and to help business operate more efficiently. Thus, I am very optimistic about Kyros.ai.”
— Huican Zhu, Ph.D., Managing Partner
“Education is the area that needs to be disrupted since long ago, and the innovation is way overdue. One of the industries Steve Jobs wanted to reinvent is education. He left the world with the ambition unrealized.
The current US education system is not working as intended. It doesn’t produce the well rounded engineers or mathematicians needed, and cannot provide sufficient personalization or automation to maximize its impact. So Kyros.ai is working in the right direction. As a long-time executive at Google, the founder Rebecca not only worked with many leaders in the Education institutes, but also understands how to utilize technology to its full potential. She has also been a good friend to our partner Huican since they were working at Google. With the right person and the right direction, we are willing to bet on this team.”
— Larry Li, Managing Partner
“Our investment theme has been data and data driven products, and we believe that artificial intelligence could bring personalization, high quality, and high efficiency to various industries, including education.
We have had early successes by investing in AI-driven EdTech companies in the past a few years, including Replit (https://replit.com/), a powerful online programming environment which kids love to learn, build, collaborate and deploy instantly in one place; Afficient Academy (https://www.afficienta.com/), an online Math and English self learning platform with ensured excellent outcome through extensive optimization using AI. Kyros.ai is targeting the College Prep and College Application market that is huge but broken. It’s a much needed bridge between the high schoolers and their dream colleges, and a bridge between the college admission officers and the perfect candidates who can thrive and contribute to the unique milieu at their college.
Recently I hosted a ClubHouse room together with Rebecca, and was extremely impressed by the information and tools she offered. I learned first hand that the demand is enormous, and there were thousands of people listening and many became paid users right away. Due to the technology platform Kyros.ai has built, students enjoy high quality personalization engines, similar to private college counselor services, with unbeatable low cost.”
— Sue Xu, Ph.D., Managing Partner
AMINO Capital is an early stage venture firm based in Palo Alto, focused on investments in big data and data driven technologies. To date, Amino has funded over 160 companies mostly in seed and Series A, including 21 successful exits, 11 unicorns, and over 15 startups with valuations above $100 million. Amino’s portfolio includes Chime Bank, Webflow, Rippling, Weee, Headspin, Wyze, Avail MedSystems, Grail (acquired by Illumina), Orbeus (acquired by Amazon), Ozlo (acquired by Facebook), GrokStyle(acquired by Facebook), Assemblage (acquired by Cisco), Woomoo (acquired by Priceline), Contastic (acquired by Sugar CRM), Mobike (acquired by Meituan), Evertoon (Acquired by Niantic | PokemonGo), Yiqixie (Acquired by Kuaishou), Dataform (accrued by Google) and et al.
