Turbo AI, a startup launched in early 2024 by two 20-year-old college dropouts, has reached five million users and generates eight-figure annual recurring revenue. The company is currently adding twenty thousand new users every day. Most of this impressive growth has occurred in the past six months, during which the AI-powered note-taking and study tool grew from one million to five million users while remaining profitable.
The idea for Turbo originated from a common classroom problem. The founders, Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, recognized the difficulty students face when trying to take notes and pay attention to a lecture simultaneously. The CEO, Sarthak Dhawan, explained his personal struggle, stating that he could never effectively do both at the same time. This led him to wonder if artificial intelligence could provide a solution.
They built their initial product, Turbolearn, as a side project. The tool allowed them to record lectures and automatically generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes. After sharing it with friends, the app spread to classmates across their universities, Duke and Northwestern. Within months, it had reached other institutions, including Harvard and MIT.
The product takes the standard note-taking formula of recording, transcribing, and summarizing and makes it interactive. It provides study notes, quizzes, and flashcards, along with a built-in chat assistant that can explain key terms or concepts. The founders discovered that recordings in large lecture halls often picked up too much background noise, so they built features that allow students to upload PDFs, slides, YouTube videos, or readings instead. Uploading existing materials has now become a more common use case than live lecture recordings.
Dhawan noted that students deeply engage with the product, often spending hours going through numerous quiz questions, which demonstrates its effectiveness in saving time and aiding information retention. The user base has also expanded beyond students, leading to a name change from Turbolearn to Turbo AI. Professionals, including consultants, lawyers, doctors, and even analysts at firms like Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, have adopted the tool. Some professionals use it to upload reports and generate summaries or convert them into podcasts for their commute.
Arora and Dhawan have been friends since middle school and have collaborated on multiple projects over the years. Dhawan previously built UMax, an advice app that reached the number one spot on the App Store, amassing 20 million users and generating six million dollars in annual revenue. Arora specializes in using social media strategies to drive explosive user growth. Despite the scale of their previous projects, they only felt the need to drop out of college for Turbo AI because they saw a unique opportunity to build a lasting business.
Unlike many fast-growing AI companies, they are cautious about raising too much money too early. They took in only seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars last year, before they had significant traction. Since then, they have received a lot of inbound interest from investors, but they are taking their time because the company is cash-flow positive and has been profitable since its inception. Their fifteen-person team is based in Los Angeles and focuses on staying close to student and creator communities at local colleges like UCLA.
Students currently pay about twenty dollars a month for the product. The founders acknowledge the price sensitivity of their core student audience and are exploring other pricing options through A/B tests as the app scales beyond its initial target group.
Turbo AI positions itself between fully manual tools like Google Docs and fully automated note-takers like Otter or Fireflies. Users have the option to let the AI take notes entirely or to write alongside it. This approach has helped Turbo stand out in a competitive space that includes other startups like Y Combinator-backed YouLearn. Dhawan stated that the company has achieved a notable milestone where students now think of Turbo AI first when they consider an AI note-taker or study tool.