Oboe raises $16M from a16z for AI-powered course creation platform

Oboe, a startup learning from Anchor founders and former Spotify executives Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, today said it has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by a16z, with participation from existing investors Eniac, Haystack, Offline and Factorial. The round also saw investments from individuals such as Adam D’Angelo, Gary Tan, Lenny Raczytsky, Matej Staniszewski, Mickey Schulman, Jared Hecht, and MJ Sigler.

This platform, which officially launched in September, allows users to set a learning goal and use artificial intelligence to create a course for them.

The startup’s fundraising comes three months after the app launched and a year after raising a $4 million seed round. Zickerman said the reason behind the new round is to boost growth on a large scale.

“We want to reach billions of people who want to learn about new topics, which is a very big opportunity,” he told TechCrunch over a phone call. “We need to execute faster and reach a larger audience at scale to realize this vision.”

“We have a team of successful consumer product makers who can execute well, which gives us an advantage over other startups in the market,” he added.

Bryan Kim, a partner at a16z, said he was impressed by how quickly Oboe started creating content around a topic and didn’t make users wait behind a loading indicator.

“We had a thesis on how AI-assisted learning could help people explore new topics and we were looking for the right company. After launching Oboe, we tried it out and loved the product. We wanted to back a founder who was ambitious, flexible in adopting different form factors, and understood AI to build a large platform. We found that in Oboe,” he told TechCrunch over a phone call.

The company is making changes to its core course creation experience as well. Earlier, Oboe created different text and audio formats for users with different styles. Additionally, it limits course creation based on payment plan.

With the new version, the app will understand your purpose first and then create chapters based on that to help you learn about those topics. Additionally, users will see other modalities such as quizzes appearing within the course material seamlessly. For some courses, Oboe will also create flashcards for you to easily remember the course material.

In terms of audio, instead of having to choose between podcast and lecture format, the company creates a podcast for you and changes its tone based on educational material and other signals from users.

Zickerman said the company noticed that there was a high demand among users to learn about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) topics. The startup has worked to provide the best materials for these topics, including programming.

He said that good teachers decide what is the best way to learn for students, and the company follows this approach in designing training courses for learners.

Oboe is revamping its pricing model to give users the ability to create unlimited courses.

However, if they want to delve deeper into a topic, they can pay $15 per month ($144 per year) to access more chapters of the course. There’s also a Pro plan for $40 per month ($384 per year), which provides unlimited access to classes and allows users to export or download courses for consumption outside of Oboe. This is suitable for students who want to take hard copies of study materials and consume them offline, the startup said.

Oboe currently offers courses in English, but wants to reach different parts of the world better through local courses and language support, Zickerman said. The platform is currently available on the web, and mobile support is planned for the future.

In the past few years, multiple tools, including Google’s NotebookLM and former Google employees’ Huxe, allow you to enter a prompt for a podcast episode exploring a topic. Although these are one-off generations, Oboe’s approach is to allow you to delve deeper into the subject matter through chapter-based learning.