The co-founders who sold their last startup, Anchor, to Spotify are launching their next project. It is called Oboe, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose simply by entering a prompt.
These courses can span a variety of subjects, including science, history, foreign language, news, pop culture, preparing for life changes, and more. At launch, Oboe will offer nine different course formats. The name Oboe is inspired by the root of a Japanese word meaning “to learn.” The formats allow users to learn in the way they prefer.
Oboe was founded by Nir Zicherman and his Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano. Zicherman left Spotify in October 2023 and, after a brief period to recharge, was inspired to work on an AI educational product. This inspiration came from his work scaling Spotify’s audiobooks business, which made educational content more accessible by bundling it with a music subscription.
Unlike AI chatbots, you do not have to engage in back-and-forth conversations to learn with Oboe. Instead, you can opt for text and visuals, audio courses, games, interactive tests, and more. For on-the-go learning, Oboe offers two audio formats. One feels like a university-style lecture, while the other is akin to a podcast, featuring two hosts talking in depth about a topic.
The technology behind Oboe is a complex, multi-agent architecture built from scratch. This system orchestrates multiple parts to run in parallel as it generates a course. The challenge was to create courses that are high quality, entirely personalized to the user’s request, and generated extremely quickly, all within seconds.
Different agents are responsible for developing the course architecture, verifying the base material, writing podcast scripts, and pulling in real images from the internet. Additional agents audit the content to ensure the courses are accurate, high-quality, and personalized to what the user wants to learn.
The courses are designed to be lightweight, engaging, and fun. Oboe’s team is also working on a recommendation engine to help users continually go deeper on a topic if they prefer. This lets the user decide if they want surface-level knowledge or a more in-depth understanding. The team believes this flexibility, combined with the variety of formats, will help Oboe appeal to a broad audience.
The founders see Oboe as a platform for lifelong learning. They note that while people often use the internet to understand things better, the internet was built to grab attention, not to teach effectively. Oboe is intended to be a one-stop shop to serve everyone’s intrinsic thirst for knowledge.
At launch, users can consume any course created by others for free and can create up to five free courses per month. After that, there are two paid tiers. Oboe Plus offers 30 additional courses for $15 per month, and Oboe Pro offers 100 courses for $40 per month.
The service will first be available on the web and mobile web, with native iOS and Android apps on the way. Oboe is currently a team of five full-time employees, including Zicherman. Mignano remains a full-time partner at VC firm Lightspeed but sits on Oboe’s board and shares the co-founder title.
The startup raised a $4 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, the same firm that led Anchor’s seed round. The investment also includes participation from Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.