The co-founder who sold his last startup anchor to Spotify has launched his next project: OBOE is an AI-powered educational app that allows you to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on almost any topic of your choice, simply by entering a prompt.
These courses can span a wide range of industries, including topics such as science, history, foreign languages, news, pop culture, and preparation for life change. At launch, the oboe – a name inspired by the roots of the Japanese word meaning “learning” – offers nine different course formats. These allow users to learn in the way they like, Oboe co-founder Neil Zicherman explained to TechCrunch.
Zicherman left Spotify in October 2023 and founded the company with Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano after spending a short period of time recharging. Zicherman said he was inspired to work on AI education products after working to scale Spotify’s audiobook business.
Unlike AI chatbots, you don’t need to participate in the previous and subsequent conversations to learn with the oboe. Instead, you can choose from text and visuals, audio courses, games, interactive tests, and more.
For those who want to learn on the go, Oboe offers two audio formats. One feels like listening to a university-style lecture, while the other is similar to a notebook lum, like Google’s podcast. This features two hosts who are talking in depth about the topic.
“The real magic here comes from the internal architecture we built, which we describe as a complex, multi-agent architecture that we built from scratch, with that part being tailored to run in parallel when generating the course,” says Zicherman.
“The challenges are both high quality, how do you create a course that is completely personalized to what users want to see and very quickly generated? All this happens within seconds,” he says.
“From developing course architectures to developing and verifying the base material being taught, creating scripts for podcasts, and extracting real images from the internet, we have agents lined up.
Some of the oboe agents audit content to ensure that the course is accurate, high quality and personalized to what users want to learn.
The course is lightweight, attractive and fun. Additionally, the Oboe team is working on a recommendation engine that will help you continually deepen your topic if you like. It’s up to the user to whether they want to gain surface-level knowledge on new topics or more in greater detail.
This, when combined with a variety of formats, will help the oboe appeal to a larger audience, the team believes.
“For me, education reminds me of a more formal academic environment and images of the kind of normative curriculum that students become accustomed to as they grow,” Zicherman tells TechCrunch. “But the truth is, we are all lifelong learners… While much of the time we spend on the Internet these days is spent on getting better at understanding things, the truth is that the Internet was built to get our attention, not to teach effectively.”
“We are very excited to be able to build a platform aimed at becoming a one-stop shop to provide everyone with an essential thirst for knowledge that exists,” he said.
At launch, users can consume any courses created by others for free, and create up to 5 free courses per month. After that, there are two paid classes. ABOOPLUS offers 30 additional courses for $15 a month. There is also OBOE Pro, which offers 100 courses for $40 per month.
The service will first be available on the web (and mobile web), but native apps for iOS and Android are approaching.
The Oboe is a full-time team of five people, including Zicherman. Mignano continues to be a full-time partner at VC Firm LightSpeed, but sits on the board of directors of Oboe, sharing the co-founder title.
The startup’s $4 million seed round was led by Eniac Ventures, the VC company that led Anchor’s seed. The round also includes investments from Haystack, Factual Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss and Matt Lieber.
