South Korea’s Mathpresso raises $8m to develop LLM for edtech

(From left) Mathpresso founders Ray Lee and Jake Lee / Photo credit: Mathpresso

Korea-based Mathpresso, an edtech company backed by Google, has received US$8 million from Korean telco giant KT Corporation in a strategic investment deal.

The funding will be used to develop a large language model (LLM) for education, which Mathpresso will use to bolster its AI tutoring services, including Qanda.

Funding details

• Funding amount: US$8,000,000
• Lead investors: KT Corporation
• Stage: Strategic investment
• Source

Qanda is a learning platform K-12 students that uses optical character recognition to scan text and math equations from photos and provide solutions.

Besides the main Qanda app, Mathpreso offers Qanda Study, which offers live large classes, and Qanda Tutor, a one-on-one online tutoring platform.

Mathpresso plans to use its own AI tech and data, along with KT’s infrastructure, to build an LLM that can avoid problems such as occasionally giving wrong or unreliable information – which can be found in existing models including GPT-4.

Last month, the firm also released a beta version of Poly, a chatbot that uses LLM to answer math questions, on the Qanda app.

Additionally, the company said it is planning to enter the US, which it called the largest private education market among English-speaking countries, by the end of 2023.

Mathpresso has more than 80 million registered users in over 50 markets, most of whom coming from outside Korea – mainly Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand.

More details