Kenyan ed-tech startup StudyLabAI has built an AI-powered study platform that turns students’ own slides, lecture recordings and notes into interactive study tools, and has signed up more than 90,000 learners across over 100 countries without raising outside funding.
Founded in August 2024 by Abdulrahman Yunis and Anas Kali, StudyLabAI is aimed at students aged 14-25, and the teachers who teach them. Users upload a PDF, lecture recording, slide deck or other study material, and the platform turns it into study tools in seconds.
“Our mission is to give every student a personal tutor, whatever their background,” said Yunis, the startup’s lead engineer. “Everything is grounded in your own course material rather than the general internet.”
Students can turn a chapter into a narrated video lesson, practise with adaptive quizzes and mock exams, review flashcards scheduled through spaced repetition, and generate notes, mind maps and audio recaps. A lecture recorder and YouTube-to-notes tool round out the offering, alongside a 24/7 AI tutor.
“It answers questions about the student’s own material and points to the exact slide or recording timestamp it drew from. It also asks follow-up questions to check understanding,” Yunis said. “The app tracks how strong each student is on every topic and feeds weak areas into the next day’s study plan, so they always know what to study next.”
The platform works in most major languages, with notes, flashcards and tutor answers following the language of the source material.
A teachers’ edition, launched in January 2026, lets educators generate video lessons, lesson plans aligned to curricula such as IB, IGCSE, AP and SAT, and differentiated worksheets, while a dashboard tracks grades and flags students who are falling behind.
“We see AI as a force multiplier: it automates the routine work so students and teachers can spend more time on real learning and human connection,” said Yunis. “It supports teachers; it does not replace them.”
Yunis started the company in his final year studying Computer Science and Engineering.
“The idea came from our own late nights. At 2am in the library, we were drowning in hundreds of lecture slides and messy notes, and spending more time organising our material than actually learning it. The process was broken,” he said. “We realised every student deserved a personal tutor available around the clock, one that adapts to them and works from their own material.”
He built the platform end to end, including the web and mobile apps, AI features and cloud infrastructure, while Kali works on product and data engineering. The pair saw three problems in the market.
“Good tutoring is expensive. One-to-one help works, but most students cannot afford a private tutor, especially outside wealthy markets,” Yunis said.
“General AI chatbots are not built for studying. They answer from the whole internet, not from what a student’s course covers. They can be confidently wrong, and they make it easy to copy answers instead of learning. And most study apps are priced for students in rich countries.”
StudyLabAI sits in between, giving students the patient, personal help of a tutor, grounded in their own material, at a price students can afford. Students mostly compare the platform to general AI assistants such as ChatGPT, and to study tools such as Quizlet, Chegg and Google’s NotebookLM.
“Our difference is the combination of a voice tutor, video tutor, answers grounded in each student’s own notes, and pricing that works for students worldwide,” said Yunis. “We are careful not to build technology for its own sake. Many edtech tools are impressive but go unused. We start with conversations with real students and teachers, find where learning gets stuck, and only then decide how AI can help.”
StudyLabAI runs on a freemium model, with students and teachers paying a monthly or yearly subscription in local currency for unlimited generation and, for teachers, advanced analytics. The startup is bootstrapped and profitable.
“We have grown on revenue from paying students rather than outside investment, which has forced us to keep costs low and build features students will actually pay for,” Yunis said.
Uptake has been largely organic, with students finding the platform through TikTok, Instagram and Google search. Its largest markets are the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and more than 1 million lessons have been created on the platform.
“We support international curricula such as IB, IGCSE, AP and the SAT, as well as custom syllabuses, which is part of why we travel well across borders,” said Yunis.
The journey has not been without its challenges.
“Every tutor session and summary costs us money in AI computing, so we have had to keep the product affordable for students while covering those costs,” he said. “Students also need answers they can rely on. Grounding every answer in the student’s own notes was our response to that.”
StudyLabAI is now offering free pilot programmes to schools and institutions so whole classes can use the platform with teacher dashboards, and plans to add more languages, including Arabic, as well as exam preparation for specific national curricula.
“Our growth so far has come from individual students and teachers,” said Yunis. “Now we want to bring StudyLabAI to whole schools.”
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