20-year-old dropouts built AI notetaker Turbo AI to 5 million users

50 million users. Eight-figure annual recurring revenue. Twenty thousand new users are joining every day. These are some tough numbers to call for a startup Turbo AI Launched in early 2024 Rudy Aurora And Sarthak DhawanTwo 20-year-old college dropouts.

Much of that growth has come in the past six months, the founders told TechCrunch, during which their AI-powered note-taking and study tool grew from 1 million to 5 million users, while remaining profitable.

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

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

So the pair created Turbolearn as a side project so they could record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards and quizzes. They started sharing it with friends, then it spread to classmates at Duke and Northwestern, where they were enrolled until dropping out this year. Within months, the app had reached other universities, including Harvard and MIT.

The product takes the simple note-taker formula—record, transcribe, summarize—and makes it interactive with study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, along with a built-in chat assistant that explains key terms or concepts.

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

“Students will upload a 30-page lecture and spend two hours going through 75 quiz questions in a row. You don’t do that unless it really works,” says Dhawan, adding that students love how the product saves time and helps them retain information.

It’s not just students using Turbo AI, though — as reflected by the name change from Turbolearn (a study app) to Turbo AI (an AI notetaker and learning assistant). Professionals have also adopted it, including consultants, lawyers, doctors and even analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, the founders said. Some, for example, upload reports and use Turbo to create summaries or convert them into podcasts they can listen to on their commute.

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

Dhawan previously created UMax, a consulting app that promised to make people more attractive and reached #1 on the App Store with 20 million users and $6 million in annual revenue. Aurora, meanwhile, specializes in using social media strategies to drive explosive growth and attract millions of users.

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

Still, unlike many fast-growing AI companies, they are wary of raising too much money too soon, taking in just $750,000 last year.

“We pitched it before we had a lot of traction. Since then, we’ve had a lot of inbound interest, but we’re taking our time because we’re cash-flow positive and we’ve been profitable the entire time as a company,” says Arora, whose 15-person team is based in Los Angeles and focuses on being close to student and maker communities like ULA College.

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

Turbo AI sits between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated note-takers like Otter or Fireflies. Users can let the AI ​​take notes or write alongside them, the founders said. This approach also helped Turbo stand out by targeting a student audience like competitors like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn.

“What’s cool now is that when students think of AI note takers or AI study tools, we’re the first thing that comes to mind,” Dhawan said.