Cavalry x Kinnu
Supercharging your learning!
Content used to be king amongst learning and edtech startups. Kinnu made an early bet in 2021 that AI would rebalance the concentration of asset value away from content and shift instead towards the technology to actually acquire and retain knowledge. The result: Kinnu’s learning app is available for iOS and Android. Go ahead, download it, and discover a whole new way of learning!
Most learning experiences today, from online courses for the university to corporate education, are designed around the needs of the educational content creator, not the learner. The Kinnu founders predicted that AI could solve that problem by optimising content for the learner, combined with a ‘learning engine’ that could power learning through adaptive experience design.
Before founding Kinnu, co-founders Christopher Kahler and Abraham Müller built and exited Qriously, a real-time market research startup backed by Accel and Spark. During their post-acquisition ‘sabbatical,’ they met Hanna Celina who would soon join as Kinnu’s third founder. It was the perfect startup founding story: they literally worked out of a garage, geeking out about the science of learning.
Kinnu is currently focusing on adult enthusiast learners — or as the team calls them: Da Vincis. These knowledge hungry people constitute over one quarter of the market for online learning today.
AI in education has recently made headlines with ChatGPT and its impact on coursework, not to mention AI tutors and the cat-and-mouse evolution of AI-powered cheating detection apps. Some people are feeling nervous about all this, but Kinnu’s co-founders are confident that AI can be used as a force for good.
Christopher believes: “The short-term applications of AI in education are just highlighting the obvious flaws in the current approach. Education in the post-AI world will force us to ask what, how, and why we learn: one-size-fits-all, siloed curricula and point-in-time evaluation will soon become anachronistic.”
We look forward to supporting the Kinnu team in taking the way we absorb and retain knowledge to the next level!
Martin Janicki, partner at Cavalry, sat down with Christopher Kahler, co-founder and CEO of Kinnu, to talk about the app and the paradigm shift in learning.
