Riiid develops AI-powered personalized learning and test-prep applications, anchored by its Santa app for TOEIC preparation. The company says Santa has been used by more than 2.5 million students in Korea and Japan and has expanded via partnerships for GMAT (with Kaplan), ACT prep (with ConnecME Education) and college-entrance exam tools in Latin America. Riiid also builds vocational education apps, including Santa Realtor for real estate exam prep and a tool for insurance agent exams. The company emphasizes R&D and IP: it has applied for 103 domestic and international patents and had 27 issued. Riiid plans to use new funding to expand its product line and grow its international footprint. Riiid builds AI education solutions centered on Santa, a mobile test-prep application for the TOEIC exam that has been used by more than a million students in Korea and Japan and reached No.1 in sales among education apps in both countries. Its proprietary AI analyzes student data and content, predicts scores and user behavior, and recommends personalized study plans in real time. The company is shifting to provide back-end solutions for companies, school districts and education ministries across a wider set of learning applications. The new funding will be used to advance its deep learning technology and to develop a formative learning support solution focused on continuous evaluation and feedback across the learning process. Riiid plans to accelerate global expansion across the U.S., South America, the Middle East and beyond. The company launched EdNet, an open AI-education database, in early 2020 and has applied for 70 patents (17 registered); it was established in 2014 and is based in Seoul. Riiid develops AI tutor solutions under the SantaInside platform and offers them as B2B products. Its SantaTOEIC service, launched in 2017, uses machine learning and deep learning to predict answer-choice probabilities and deliver 1:1 personalized curricula; the service has accumulated about 900,000 members. The company’s R&D team includes more than 30 math and computer-science masters and PhDs from institutions such as UC Berkeley, Yale, Seoul National University, KAIST, POSTECH, Korea University, and Hanyang University. Riiid has published AI research at the NeurIPS conference (a domestic first) and holds or has filed 41 patents across Korea, the U.S., China, and Japan. The firm plans to use new funding for aggressive R&D and to further develop and commercialize SantaInside across additional exam areas (SAT, civil-service exams) and to expand internationally. Financial specifics beyond the recent round size were not disclosed in the article.

Total raised

$235M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

May 2021