YoLearn AI is humanising LLMs for education
The Noida-based startup is building the final form of AI tutors: ones that are empathetic, emotion-aware, hyper-personalised, and adaptive to each student’s needs.
After spending years in the education sector working for companies that provide educational services like Aakash and PhysicsWallah, Kirti Prakash Mishra noticed a persistent problem. There was no scope for adaptive learning where every individual student got personalised attention to understand their personal needs and requirements.
Then AI models started becoming commercial and ushered in the age of AI chatbots. However, most of them continue to be wrappers on top of already existing applications. To ensure children have access to AI chatbots that pay attention to the students’ needs, Mishra joined hands with Vishal Kashyap and co-founded YoLearn AI in 2025.
“I started building this back when I was working at PhysicsWallah. Then I realised that I needed to go independent to fully realise this. I started working on it in November 2024, and in January 2025, I launched my company. It took me about 18 months to develop it from scratch,” Mishra tells YourStory.
The startup’s 23-member team is based in Noida. It also raised a total of $200,000 across multiple angel rounds in July, October and November.
Developing human-like AI tutors
To break the mould of AI chatbots that follow a wrapper model, YoLearn has instead taken subject-specific models and fine-tuned them. The startup is building AI tutors whose custom architecture is built on its own proprietary data, including voice conversation data and open-source data related to real teacher-to-student conversations.
“A key technological innovation involves integrating Anthropic knowledge graphs using MCP connectors, which is a unique approach. No one has ever tried it yet. This system provides the deep adaptivity and unlimited knowledge necessary for effective, conversational tutoring,” Mishra explains.
It is also building AI assistants for teachers. Those assistants would help them automate their daily chores from lesson plans and evaluate assignments—saving time and creating personalised learning content. It would also create an AI CoTeacher Avatar for teachers, to assist students in homework, resolve their doubts and teach concepts.
Growing the business
YoLearn employs a Pay-As-You-Go model for its AI tutors, which they refer to as learning companions. The business model is structured to initially target B2C Gen Z users via social media campaigns, followed by expansion into teacher products and then B2B school clients.
In terms of cost, the basic chat functionality is free. However, users are charged when they switch to higher-engagement features, such as live audio interaction or live video interaction. Pricing depends on the duration of the conversation, the length of the interaction, and the specific tools used (e.g., a flash card, podcast generator, or live video).
Users consume tokens for these advanced interactions, which must be acquired via recharge after the initial sign-up provides some free tokens. The minimum user expenditure can be around $5/month to $100/month, depending on usage. There is no subscription fee.
Presently in the beta stage, the startup has amassed 12 B2B clients and about 4,000 active B2C users.
Mishra says the AI tutoring space is largely unexplored—no platform today offers a truly full-fledged AI tutor capable of replacing or exceeding a human teacher’s experience. While partial versions exist globally like Khanmigo, CK-12 Flexi, and Duolingo, and in India with AI Guru (PhysicsWallah)and Siqiq.ai, none provide a complete, emotionally intelligent, real-time learning experience, the CEO emphasises.
He adds that YoLearn is building the final form of AI tutors—one that is capable of real-time audio-video conversations, sketchpad and visual explanations, and guided by strong pedagogy and learning science principles. The startup is aiming to build tutors that are empathetic, emotion-aware, hyper-personalised, and adaptive, making learning as natural and human as it can get.
“Our true competitors aren’t other edtech startups. They’re the frontier LLMs themselves (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) and we’re building the layer that humanises them for education,” he signs off.
YoLearn AI is part of YourStory’s Tech30 cohort—a selection of India’s most promising startups of 2025—unveiled at TechSparks Bengaluru.
