Our Mission
To solve the challenges of student motivation and understanding in K-12 education through the right balance of Human + AI.
Lessons from scaling
CoLearn was founded in 2020 by Abhay Saboo and Marc Irawan and backed by institutional investors such as PeakXV and TNB Aura. Our pre-GenAI homework helper quickly reached 4 million monthly active users. This scale taught us an important lesson: unsupervised AI does not automatically lead to learning. Developing minds naturally seek shortcuts, and most students bypassed educational scaffolding to view answers. Learning involves friction and requires motivation.
To solve this, we introduced cohort-based live classes that integrate teachers, parents, and peers, mirroring the social infrastructure of the formal K-12 ecosystem.
A Lab with global relevance
Headquartered in Singapore and operating from Indonesia, CoLearn leverages Southeast Asia’s unique and diverse educational performance as an ideal global laboratory for testing scalable and transferable educational experiments. Within one-hour flight radius, the region hosts the entire global spectrum of academic performance according to PISA rankings:
- Top 10% global performers (Singapore)
- 50th percentile mid-tier systems (Vietnam and Malaysia)
- Bottom 10% global performers (Indonesia and the Philippines)
To scale our insights globally, we launched CoLearnLab. We partner with global organizations and individuals to build a future where humans play a productive role in society as critical thinkers and problem solvers.