The co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify are launching their next project: Oboe, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose, simply by entering a prompt.
These courses can span a variety of verticals, including topics like science, history, foreign language, news, pop culture, preparing for life changes, and more. At launch, Oboe — a name inspired by the root of the Japanese word meaning “to learn” — will offer nine different course formats. These allow users to learn in the way they prefer, Oboe co-founder Nir Zicherma explained to TechCrunch.
Zicherman founded the company along with Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano after leaving Spotify in October 2023 and taking a brief period to recharge. Zicherman said he was inspired to work on an AI educational product after working to scale Spotify’s audiobooks business, which made it easier for people to gain access to high-quality and educational content, as it was bundled with their music subscription.
Unlike AI chatbots, you don’t have to engage in back-and-forth conversations to learn with Oboe. Instead, you can opt for 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 more like listening to a university-style lecture, while the other is akin to Google’s podcast-like NotebookLM, as it features two hosts talking in depth about the topic.
“The real magic here comes from an internal architecture that we’ve built that I would describe as a complex, multi-agent architecture that we built from scratch, each part of which is orchestrated to run in parallel as we generate a course,” Zicherman says.
“The challenge is, how do you create courses that are both high quality, entirely personalized to what the user wants to see, and also get generated extremely quickly? This all happens within seconds,” he says.
“We have agents that, in parallel, are responsible for everything from developing the course architecture to developing and verifying the base material that’s being taught, writing the script for the podcast, pulling in real images from the internet — not AI-generated images, but real images and visuals into the reading formats that we offer,” he added.
Some of Oboe’s agents audit the content to ensure the courses are accurate, high-quality, and personalized to what the user wants to learn.
The courses are meant to be lightweight, engaging, and fun. Plus, Oboe’s team is working on a recommendation engine that will help you continually go deeper on a topic, if you prefer. That leaves it up to the user as to whether they want to gain some surface-level knowledge about a new topic or whether they want to get more in-depth.
This, combined with the variety of formats, will help Oboe appeal to a broader audience, the team believes.
“To me, education conjures up images of more formal academic settings and the types of prescriptive curricula that students are used to as they grow up,” Zicherman tells TechCrunch. “But the truth is, we are all lifelong learners … So much of the time that we spend on the internet these days is spent trying to better understand things, but the truth is that the internet was built to grab our attention, not to teach effectively.”
“We’re very excited to build a platform that is intended to be the one-stop shop to serve that intrinsic thirst for knowledge that exists in every person,” he said.
At launch, users can consume any course created by others for free and can create up to five free courses per month. After that, there are two paid tiers: Oboe Plus, which offers 30 additional courses for $15 per month, and 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 on the way.
Oboe is a team of five full-time, including Zicherman. Mignano remains a full-time partner at VC firm Lightspeed but sits on Oboe’s board and shares the co-founder title.
The startup’s $4 million seed round was led by Eniac Ventures, the VC firm that led Anchor’s seed. The round also includes investment from Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.