Gurugram-based SigIQ.ai bags USD 9.5 million (~INR 82 crore) in seed funding round, co-led by The House Fund and GSV Ventures. The round also saw participation from institutional and strategic investors, including Duolingo, General Catalyst India (Venture Highway), Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India), Calibrate Ventures and a group of angel investors from the top echelons of academia and tech.
Among the angels are Andy Konwinski (Co-founder, Perplexity), Christian Storm (Co-founder & CTO, Turnitin) and professors from UC Berkeley, MIT and Princeton – a sign of the deep-rooted credibility and academic backing of this venture.
SigIQ.ai
Founded in 2023 by Dr. Karttikeya Mangalam, an AI PhD from UC Berkeley and Professor Kurt Keutzer, a renowned AI researcher and faculty at the Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR), SigIQ.ai enters the education space with a big mission: to deliver elite one-on-one tutoring at the cost of computation, not human labor.
At the heart of SigIQ.ai’s mission is solving Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem – a well known education research finding that students who get personalized tutoring perform two standard deviations better than those in regular classrooms. Scaling such personalized instruction has been economically infeasible. SigIQ.ai’s platform is a technological inflection point that promises personalized, context-aware tutoring powered by advanced generative AI systems.
Flagship Products: PadhAI & EverTutor.ai
Emerging from 18 months of stealth, SigIQ.ai now has two flagship products:
- PadhAI: For India’s UPSC Civil Services Exam, one of the toughest academic exams in the world. The platform delivers contextualized, multilingual tutoring and has already onboarded 2,00,000+ users in six months.
- EverTutor.ai: For GRE test prep in the U.S. market, it has already got 10,000+ users in 90 days. The company plans to roll out across the spring and fall 2025 exam cycles.
What differentiates these from generic edtech tools or chatbot-based tutors is their deep interactivity and adaptiveness. Unlike scripted systems, SigIQ.ai’s tutors engage dynamically, offering contextual instruction, real-time feedback and personalized learning paths tailored to each student’s progress.
SigIQ.ai Pre-Series A – Use of Funds
The new capital will be used for:
- Hiring top talent
- Improving proprietary generative AI models
- Scaling PadhAI and EverTutor globally, especially in India and the US
According to CEO Dr. Karttikeya Mangalam, “We are at a point where GenAI can give every student a 1:1 tutor—transform education from a scarcity model to an abundance model”
With teams in California and Gurugram and strong cross-border academic roots, the startup is uniquely positioned to operate at the intersection of deep research, real-world educational need and global scalability
Investors Vision
Jeremy Fiance, Managing Director, The House Fund, said: “This isn’t your average edtech startup. They have publicly shown their AI can outperform humans and existing AI solutions on the toughest exams in the world. That changes everything”
Investors and academic backers view SigIQ.ai as one of the most promising attempts to productize deep learning in a way that translates to societal upliftment—bringing affordable, quality education to the world’s underserved learners
Looking Ahead
While current traction is in test prep markets, the company is clear about its bigger ambitions. The long-term roadmap includes:
- K-12 education
- Localization in multiple Indian languages
- Broadening the curriculum across STEM and humanities
- Integration with formal education systems
SigIQ.ai will also be showcasing its next-gen capabilities at the upcoming ASU+GSV Summit, the global stage for edtech innovation
Conclusion
In a crowded AI and edtech landscape, SigIQ.ai stands out not just because of what it says, but because of what it shows—both in product and performance. With a research-driven foundation, an elite investor pool and early traction in large, diverse markets, SigIQ.ai is going to be a generational edtech company.
The USD 9.5M seed round might just be the starting bell of a bigger disruption—a reshaping of global education where the best tutor in the world isn’t human, but it’s just a tap away
For more details related to IPO GMP, SEBI IPO Approval, and Live Subscription stay tuned to IPO Central.