What the business is
Buddy.ai is a subscription app with an animated conversational AI character that teaches English as a second language to young children.
The bet
A game-like animated AI character can give children the daily English speaking practice that there are never enough teachers to provide.
Starting capital
$11M seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures with One Way Ventures, J Ventures and Point72 Ventures among others.
How it started
Crewkov moved from Siberia to the US in 2014 while his startup Cubic.AI was about to launch a Kickstarter for a smart speaker; a week before it went live, Amazon launched Echo and the company was sold two years later. His eldest daughter's online tutor was reading scripted answers, which gave him the idea of an AI character to do the same job.
What happened
He thought the product would reach market in six months, which he now calls naive; it took years. The team had to meet COPPA and similar laws and train a model to understand children's voices in a language they barely knew, so it collected data first in countries without strict rules like COPPA. It also began working with schools in countries such as Brazil.
How it ended up
After seven years the app was approaching 55 million downloads. Crewkov says it took talks with 186 investors to close the round, and BITKRAFT was only the second firm he spoke to. All the capital goes to product development, with a head of game design and a head of UX to be hired, more languages and more school ties planned.
What has to be true
After Amazon launched Echo, Crewkov says, competing with Amazon and Google on a smart speaker made no sense.
His daughter's tutor read from scripts, which seemed automatable with a conversational AI character.
Children's data rules like COPPA pushed the team to train its first model on data from countries without such rules.
A gaming fund suited a product that children treat as a game, according to Crewkov.
What can be applied
The founder who lost one startup to a platform giant's launch picked a niche, young non-native English learners, where scale, children's privacy law and data were the real moats.
Aftermath
As of 2024-10-31 Buddy.ai said it had nearly 55 million downloads and 22 million-plus students a year, per the founder. The seed money was earmarked for product development, new languages and school partnerships; no revenue figure was given.
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