We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Solvely, the AI study companion for students stuck on hard STEM problems. The $5M seed round is the company’s first institutional capital and the numbers the founders bring to it are the kind bootstrappers dream about: more than 1M downloads, 4.5M problems solved and seven figures of ARR – at breakeven, on their own money, in well under a year.
Every student with a phone now has a chatbot to ask for homework help. For an essay plan, fine. For advanced maths and science it’s a different story: the chatbot will walk you through a wrong answer with total confidence, and on genuinely hard problems even the best general-purpose models fail more often than they pass. For the Solvely team, that was just not good enough.
Photograph any problem – mechanics, statistics, organic chemistry and more – and Solvely returns the right answer in seconds, with a tutor-style walkthrough of how to reach it. Its purpose-built solving engine scores roughly double the accuracy of incumbent apps on advanced material, and students can tell the difference: 350,000 problems a week now flow through the app, and 12,000 students pay $13 a month for it – less than the price of a single hour with a tutor. The longer vision is a genuine AI tutor: adaptive practice, personalised study plans, a patient teacher in every pocket.
Then there’s the team, and what a team. Du Zhang won a global hackathon as a university freshman, co-founded Shunshun Education and scaled it to a partial exit to TAL Education, then built a profitable consumer app business; Richard Weiqi Zhang went from Harvard to opening five international schools across Asia; Dr Enpeng (Nick) Yuan spent four years as a research scientist at Meta Reality Labs after a machine learning PhD at Georgia Tech. Consumer growth, real classrooms and serious ML skills, on one founding team.
And when we ran Solvely past the learning and product leaders in our Venture Partner community – operators who’ve founded and scaled some of the biggest consumer learning companies in the world – the diligence calls kept turning into something else entirely: offers to advise, and to invest.
“Anyone can demo a chatbot that explains algebra. What Du, Richard and Nick have built is simply, measurably better – so much better that students who could settle for free are choosing to pay, in their thousands. Cracking that challenge takes accuracy a student can trust inside an app experience they actually enjoy. Du, Richard and Nick have lived every side of that problem. We’re delighted to be their first institutional backers.”
Mario, Emerge
The round will deepen Solvely’s research bench, expand its subject coverage and grow its community of learners worldwide.
Du, Richard, Nick – welcome to the Emerge community. Show your working!
