Aug 23, 2023

Sizzle AI This story is available exclusively to Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Sizzle AI is a new AI tutoring chatbot startup where students can get help with STEM homework. Students can type out or send in a picture of a problem and get customized step-by-step advice. Sizzle AI was founded by an ex-Meta vice president and just raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Jerome Pesenti says he's "not sure" if he's a good tutor. As the father of four children, he would often get roped into helping them with math and science homework assignments after work, but they would sometimes hit roadblocks that most parents are all too familiar with. But over the past year, he realized that an AI chatbot could do most of the work that he was doing, like asking different questions to prompt his kids to think through problems. "I thought with all the progress in AI, we could really give people access to a better learning companion, a better tutor," he said. Pesenti was in a unique position to build this type of tool. He had over 25 years of experience working in AI and machine learning engineering, and had spent the last five years as a vice president of AI at Meta . "I wanted to do something where people say, 'this AI made my life better,'" he said. In January, he decided he wanted to build an AI tutoring assistant full-time, and founded Sizzle AI, a chatbot AI tutor that can help middle and high school students with their science, tech, engineering, and math homework. Sizzle AI has launched in both the Apple App store and Google Play store and just raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Owl Ventures , with participation from 8VC . Using the Sizzle chatbot, students can either type in a problem set from a homework assignment or take a photo of the problem and have Sizzle analyze it using AI. Then, Sizzle will respond with questions about where to begin on the problem and help the student to solve it themselves. AI chatbots often spark cheating fears in parents and teachers, but by breaking down the problems into step-by-step questions, students are encouraged to think through how to solve the problem, rather than jump straight to the answer, Pesenti explained. With Sizzle, students can also submit photos of how they worked through a problem at each step, rather than just the final answer, to show how they arrived at the solution. Other AI tutoring chatbots have popped up in recent months, most notably Khan Academy's Khanmigo chatbot. Many students are also using OpenAI's ChatGPT to help them with homework assignments and sometimes cheat on them. Sizzle AI narrows its focus for now on homework questions from middle school and high school STEM courses, such as chemistry, physics, biology, and math courses. But for Pesenti, the goal is not to give students an easy path to an answer, but to use AI to provide the customized coaching that can lead to longer-lasting learning. "We want to encourage them to try to answer the problem in as many ways as possible," said Pesenti. Sizzle currently has around a 90% accuracy rate when it comes to the final answers of the problems, said Pesenti, which is not perfect, but this is notated clearly in the app, he emphasized. Sizzle also has a feedback feature where users can flag if an answer is incorrect to help train the tutor to get better. The startup publicly launched its tutoring assistant in August, and only has a small number of student users so far. Pesenti plans to keep it free for the time being to maximize access to new learners. For Emily Bennett at Owl Ventures, Pesenti's domain expertise in AI combined with Sizzle's ability to help students with their own specific homework problems convinced her to back the company. "AI will have a profound effect on the global education system and Sizzle AI is leading the way with an app that allows all learners to learn more interactively on their own," she said. With the fresh funds from Owl Ventures and 8VC, the team's main goal is to focus on improving accuracy and acquiring new student users. But long term, they plan to expand into more subjects besides STEM, Pesenti said. See the pitch deck that Sizzle AI used to raise $7.5 million in seed funding: Sizzle