Pensive is a Silicon Valley-based education technology startup whose AI platform allows professors and teaching assistants to automate grading and instant feedback for large university lectures. The company says its system cuts grading time by up to ten-fold and has already processed 3 million grading tasks and facilitated more than 300,000 AI tutoring sessions since its closed beta launch in February. Over 1,000 professors and TAs across 100+ institutions—including Harvard, UC Berkeley and Columbia—are active users. Founded by CEO Yoon-Seok Yang, a UC Berkeley graduate and published AI researcher, and CTO Min-Jun Kim, a former senior ML engineer, the team now includes alumni from Carnegie Mellon, Yale and Dartmouth. Pensive originated from the founders’ work at Socratic AI and their observation of bottlenecks in large-scale university courses. With the new capital, the startup plans to enhance its product and deepen penetration in the higher-education grading market. Long-term, Pensive aims to evolve from grading automation into a full AI-driven personalized learning platform.

Total raised

$7M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Feb 2026