Iulian Serban
CEO, CTO, Co-founder, Korbit
Korbit co-founder Iulian Serban, an award-winning researcher who completed his PhD in AI and personal assistants technology at Quebec AI Institute (Mila), University of Montreal, strongly believes that providing an AI-powered personalized learning experience can help students to learn faster and better in a cost-effective way. Supported by renowned Canadian AI expert Yoshua Bengio, Korbit is building the future of online education. Its unique intelligent tutors teach students through interactive exercises and conversations. Students complete exercises while conversing with an intelligent tutor online, which adapts itself to each student’s personal learning profile and provides targeted pedagogical interventions.
The company just closed its seed round funding of over $2.1 million USD ($2.8 million CAD) in September 2019. After closing the seed round, the company has quickly expanded from a team of four to a team of 12 in Canada, plus a few contractors from other parts of the world. Eighty-five percent of the team will be working on software development and creating online courses.
As a Canadian education technology start-up, Korbit will play an important role in transforming higher education in Canada and the rest of the world. The young company is targeting universities and the corporate training market in a push to start generating revenue in 2020. Korbit’s core product, the unique intelligent tutors, can be applied to different subjects. The AI system, which is powered by deep learning, reinforcement learning, and natural language processing, will be greatly improved automatically through engagement with more users over time. That’s why Korbit will be able to create a series of data science courses in 2020 — because the system behind it has been running and being tested by more than 3,000 real-world users for almost a year already. In the long run, Korbit’s AI system will allow the company to bring personalized, high-quality education to everyone in a shorter time!
