Mattia Mauro on Personalized AI Tutoring with Excellence

The founding team shares a passion for math and science: Alexis, the CTO, and I won the international Physicist's’ Tournament together in 2022. Alexis has been tutoring for 7 years, and I personally come from a family of teachers. Although there are many EdTech companies we couldn’t find the product that we would have liked to use - or that I would have recommended to my little sister who is currently in 12th grade. We focus on high-quality learning that improves grades on the long term, and foster motivation, which is key, looping in parents with an efficient reward system that gets children hooked in. As AI offers groundbreaking ways to make learning more efficient, it also risks giving birth to subpar or low quality solutions. We aim to use it only in ways that improve learning efficiency, and offer a premium, effective tool for improving children’s grades - and understanding. 

We stand out from AI platforms as we aren’t an AI tutor creating flashcards and multiple choice questions to help students cram for exams, or answering questions to avoid homework. We are a program fostering long-term learning, individualized by AI, with our own, proprietary and premium content, and a high-support environment spanning multimodal AI tutoring and optional human mentorship by graduate students from top universities. The aim is to fill knowledge gaps, rebuild foundations and accelerate learning alongside what the student does at school. We’re also perfectly integrated with local school curricula to maximize the impact on grades. We’re called Excellence because our goal is to help children give their best and turn struggling students into top-of-class achievers. 

It really depends on geography, but the academic level in the US has been plunging in the last 20 years. The curriculum is very weak, but that doesn’t make it easy. It is ill-structured and confusing and that’s why our students benefit immensely from just learning through our curriculum and being able to ask questions. It is ironic to see that as AI, data science, finance and other high-paying jobs increasingly require math and science skills, the school system is failing students. The collapse of the schools’ level damages the lives of all students, and particularly of those whose parents’ can’t help them enough. We aim to help changing that. Another problem is the decrease in students’ ability to concentrate and focus. The causes are complex, but most teachers and educators agree it’s a reality. Our app tackles this issue directly: our bite-sized courses require only a few minutes of concentration at a time; the course can be taught by our AI tutor, a feature students love as a complement to actively reading; and our motivation system linking parents, children and optionally human mentors creates the right accountability and reward incentives to have them proactively work. In the end, the best learning - and outcomes in life - are achieved by autonomous commitment, not coercion. And that’s what we provide. 

We aim to bring structure to a child’s learning, integrating with their curriculum and creating routines that stick. We are a high-support environment for learning, with optimized and individualized materials, 24/7 tutoring and human mentorship. We give each child what they need to succeed. 

We have launched less than 2 months ago and our students have already seen great progress. An 11th grade student went from having severe knowledge gaps on fractions (material several years below her age) and being held back by this to complete mastery. 

At its core, learning becomes optimal when it’s personalized. Even ancient romans and greeks hired tutors for their elites - they certainly didn’t send them to school. This is why the current system is failing; and now, technology allows to provide a personalized education to everyone. Through a human assessment, 24/7 AI tutoring and optional human mentorship, Excellence crafts a nearly optimal path for each child, adjusting it iteratively to continuously increase learning efficiency. When following a handcrafted path and consuming personalized materials, children can learn multiple times faster than at school. And achieve spectacular progress.

It is critical for us to integrate the latest findings of cognitive science, of which we’re passionate about, in the learning experience. We use spaced repetition and active recall to optimize the students’ workload. On top of that, we rely on novel techniques that AI allow such as encouraging students to explain theorems and problems out loud (and validate their answer), lead them pedagogically to a solution and adapt the learning path extremely granularly. The bottom line is school is a one-size-fits-all experience, where students have to adhere to a specific pace, whereas Excellence individualizes learning to increase efficiency. 

The challenge in selling to schools is their slow speed, especially in the public sector, and teachers’ fear of change. We circumvent that by mainly selling to private schools, which are faster and more responsive while developing a comprehensive go to market strategy towards the public system. 

The hardest challenge is cutting through the noise in B2C sales — reaching parents! We're targeting specific groups and communities on Facebook and Nextdoor, and our B2B2C strategy is helping us gain visibility. We're looking for help — reach out if you're interested! 

Most of our strategic decisions went against conventional wisdom — and most were wrong! Even working in EdTech was considered a risky choice. But we are driven by the hope of improving children's learning outcomes, even if it’s hard. And unconventional bet we made that was right happened when we discovered that most of our students couldn’t concentrate more than a few minutes when reading a course. Instead of going the easy path, degrading the quality and depth of our content, we decided to incorporate voice AI to make the course experience interactive. The student can listen to the AI explaining our course, ask questions and watch it draw diagrams and turn pages. It is like a personalized and interactive video, while safeguarding the quality and ambition of our content. Of course students can always read through it, but this option has been widely acclaimed. 

In 5 years I hope we’ll have spread across borders — US, Europe, South Korea, and subjects — Physics, Literature, History, Chemistry, Philosophy, and much more. We aim at providing all the support a proven structure, curated content and technology can bring to children and their parents. 

A typical day begins around 5:30AM when I wake up and start thinking about my startup. I try to fall asleep again, but usually can’t. I plan my day, define priorities, review sessions of our students to understand what’s working (and what isn’t), then meet with my co-founders. After that, coding or marketing, depending on priorities, a quick walk for lunch, and then emails and marketing again. Plans change and take a lot of time and mental space. I am driven by 3 things: do a great job for our students, make our team work together, and deliver returns to the investors who have backed us, and without whom we couldn’t be here. It is a lot of pressure, but a startup is the best way for me to express my full potential: what we make sure our students achieve.