20-year-old leaker built Turbo AI-powered note-taking software for 5 million users

Five million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand new users join daily. These are some strong numbers for a startup called Turbo AI that was launched in early 2024 by Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, two 20-year-old college dropouts.

Most of that growth has come in the past six months, the founders told TechCrunch, as the AI-powered note-taking and study tool has grown from one million to five million users, while remaining profitable.

They say the idea for Turbo stems from a classroom problem many college students face: trying to take notes while paying attention to the lecture at the same time.

“I always had difficulty taking notes because I couldn’t listen to the teacher and write at the same time. I couldn’t do it,” said CEO Dhawan. “Every time I tried to take notes, I stopped paying attention. And when I listened, I couldn’t take notes. I was thinking, what if I could use artificial intelligence?”

So the duo built Turbolearn as a side project to allow them to record lectures and automatically create notes, flashcards, and quizzes. They started sharing it with friends, then it spread to classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where they were enrolled until he dropped out this year. Within months, the app had reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.

The product takes the usual note-taking formula—recording, transcribing, and summarizing—and makes it interactive with study notes, tests, and flashcards, along with a built-in chat assistant that explains key terms or concepts.

However, recordings in large auditoriums often pick up background noise, so the founders built features that allow students to upload PDFs, lectures, YouTube videos, or readings instead. This is now a more common use case than live lecture recordings.

“Students will download a 30-page lecture and spend two hours reviewing 75 test questions in a row. You can only do that if it really works,” Dhawan said, noting that students like how the product saves time and helps them retain information.

It’s not just students using Turbo AI, as evidenced by the name change from Turbolearn (a study app) to Turbo AI (an AI note taker and learning assistant). Professionals have embraced it as well, including consultants, lawyers, doctors, and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders say. Some, for example, upload reports and use Turbo to create summaries or turn them into podcasts they can listen to on the go.

Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have collaborated on multiple projects over the years.

Dhawan previously built UMax, a consulting app that promised to make people more attractive and reached No. 1 on the App Store with 20 million users and annual revenue of $6 million. Meanwhile, Arora specializes in using social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract millions of users.

Creating viral apps is a rare skill. But despite the scale of their previous ventures, the founders only felt the need to drop out of Turbo because they saw an opportunity to build a lasting business.

However, unlike many fast-growing AI companies, it is cautious about raising too much money too early, raising just $750,000 last year.

“We brought this up before we had a lot of interest. Since then, we’ve had a lot of internal interest, but we’re taking our time because we’ve been cash flow positive and profitable for as long as we’ve been a company,” Arora said, adding that their 15-person team is based in Los Angeles and focuses on staying close to the student and creative communities at colleges like UCLA.

Students pay about $20 a month for the product, but the founders say they are exploring other pricing options to reflect students’ sensitivity to price, even as the app outgrows its target group. “Right now, we are experimenting with other rates and doing a lot of A/B testing to see what works,” Arora added.

Turbo AI falls between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated note-taking devices like Otter or Fireflies. The founders say users can let the AI ​​take notes or write alongside it. This approach has helped Turbo stand out even as competitors, like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn, target a similar student audience.

“The great thing now is that when students think of an AI-powered note-taker or study tool, we are the first ones that come to mind,” Dhawan said.