Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, now both 20, have been friends since sixth grade.
By high school, they were coding together and building viral apps — including a Christmas light installation app that made $60,000 in revenue, Dhawan told Business Insider.
They’re still in business together, now running Turbo AI, a notetaking app that has grown from 1 million to 5.7 million users in the past six months. The company says the app is adding about 20,000 new users each day and is on track to earn eight-figures in annual recurring revenue.
They couldn’t find an AI tool for students, so they built one.
The idea for Turbo came after the two started college in 2023. Arora was attending Northwestern, and Dhawan was at Duke.
“I had a problem where I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time,” Dhawan said. “At the same time, AI was starting to boom.”
Dhawan and Arora decided to build and test a tool that leveraged AI to record lectures and generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes to enhance the learning process.
Related stories
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know
Don’t mistake Turbo as a shortcut for slackers, however. Dhawan and Arora both have serious academic credentials. Dhawan was the salutatorian of his high school, took 21 AP classes, and earned a perfect score on the ACT, while Arora took 16 AP courses and earned a 1560 on the SAT, which they’ve noted on their LinkedIn profiles.
They’re channeling their own experience as top students to develop Turbo’s internal benchmarking system, which tests different combinations of inputs and outputs to pinpoint the information that matters most.
AI notetaking apps have become a hot category in Silicon Valley over the past year. Granola, an AI notetaking app that launched in 2024, announced a $43 million Series B round in May. Read AI, an AI assistant founded in 2021 that creates AI-generated summaries, transcriptions, and video highlights of meetings, announced a $50 million Series B funding round in October 2024. Even established players in the productivity market like Zoom and Notion have launched AI notetaking tools.
When Dhawan and Arora first launched Turbo last year, they said there wasn’t much competition.
“There was actually nothing for students on the market,” he said. “That’s also part of a reason for our success — we’ve been doing it for longer than the other competitors.”
Their launch was scrappy. They made rounds on their respective campuses, gave out cookies, and put up posters inside bathroom stalls, Arora said. Then they took to social media. “I posted like 40, 50 TikToks, and then the 40th or 50th one went mega viral. It got like 20 million views,” Arora said.
They now have users at colleges across the country, including Harvard and MIT. They said they even have customers at Goldman Sachs and a few employees at McKinsey. They’ve both now dropped out of college and have a full-time team of 15 people.
The company makes money through subscriptions — $20 a month or $120 a year — and has been bootstrapped since launch. It raised a little over $750,000 from inbound investor interest. The founders said they have no plans to seek additional funding since it’s already operating profitably.
Quality is key in the AI age
Turbo AI
Dhawan and Arora say quality is their top priority.
“What AI has done is it’s taken the barrier to entry to building software and it’s decreased it,” Dhawan said. “Now, because consumers expect more, and AI has enabled us to ship features faster, the emphasis is all on quality, retention, usage, stickiness.”
The pair has redesigned their quiz question feature, for instance, three or four times, Dhawan said. While it wasn’t initially their top focus, it’s now their most used tool, he added.
Another big insight they’ve learned: Presentation is crucial. “No one wants to look at something that’s not pretty, and especially students, there’s a whole trend of people spending hours and hours on their iPad making notes pretty,” Dhawan said.
They’ve seen that many users turn to Turbo just to transform “PDFs that look kind of ugly” into a more readable, aesthetically pleasing format, he said.
As they look ahead, their mandate is simple: “We’re trying to show that AI can be used positively,” Dhawan said. “It’s a very powerful tool for actually enhancing the speed at which you learn.”
