Why We Invested in Lirvana Labs
We are excited to share that Lirvana Labs has raised $5.3MM in early-stage financing, with participation from Chingona Ventures. Lirvana Labs, the creator of the Yeti Confetti Kids app, utilizes machine learning to curate safe and effective multimedia content and literature that boosts Social Emotional Learning (SEL), English Literacy, and Mathematical Reasoning skills in early childhood and elementary years.
Lirvana Labs was an idea spun out of the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the company’s co-founders, Clement and Christie Pang, watched parents and caregivers alike tasked with homeschooling their children while often maintaining their careers from home. With the pandemic interrupting the education of 1.6 billion children globally, roughly one in five working-age adults in the U.S. cited that the reason they were not working was because COVID-19 disrupted their childcare arrangements. Of this population, women ages 25–44 were disproportionately affected as they were nearly three times more likely than men to not be working due to childcare demands. Around the same time, Christie, a mother of three toddlers herself, witnessed the acceleration of AI in her own city. She recently shared in an interview with Canvas Rebel, “[we] caught ourselves asking how it was possible that Silicon Valley had all of this new technology at its fingertips, and yet no one focused on how it could help families and teachers.”
In 2020, Christie decided to step down from her role as the Head of TMT at HSBC Commercial Banking, and Clement — a repeat founder with a $375MM exit under his belt — left his role as Principal Engineer at VMWare. Together, the sibling duo embarked on building the AI-enabled, early childhood education company in stealth mode. Fast forward to August of 2022, Lirvana Labs closed a $2MM fundraising round in true pre-seed fashion — two founders, pre-product, pre-revenue — with participation from Chingona Ventures. By March, Clement and Christie had recruited a team of seven other industry veterans with expertise in AI, machine learning, education, and children’s media.
After studying 120 hours worth of child interaction with their “pretotype,” Lirvana Labs launched Yeti Confetti Kids in June of 2023. The AI-enabled app offers a comprehensive curriculum with a focus on Social Emotional Learning through individually paced, curated educational content such as videos, cartoons, songs, audiobooks, demos, and dances, along with real-time assessments — all guided by a patentable large language model (LLM). The personalized learning companion also features an AI-powered “adventure buddy” that offers human-like feedback, hints, and tips to learners, plus a separate interface for parents to view live reporting and set controls. In addition, the platform encourages healthy screen time habits by minimizing the time required for the mastery of a subject while maximizing the amount of fun.
Since going live, the Yeti Confetti Kids app has gained significant traction, boasting over 519k impressions, 30k views, and 15k downloads in 50 countries via iOS and Android. On top of that, its user base has grown by 10% every week, and 1 in 4 individuals are considered monthly active users (MAUs) in the first 6 months of release. Outside of the app itself, the Yeti Confetti YouTube channel has garnered 8.4 million hits, 230k views, and nearly 1k subscribers.
When building Lirvana Labs, Clement and Christie did not design the app to only address the needs of the more affluent parts of the world, but also chose to partner with organizations in areas where the accessibility gap to quality, consistent education was the widest. In doing so, they partnered with Jusoor, an international NGO that looks to increase access to education for displaced Syrian refugee youths. The team established its flagship, needs-based classroom trial with 350 Syrian refugee children through this organization, setting out to make an impact and prove the first-of-its-kind technology’s efficacy in improving learning outcomes. Outside of working with other NGOs, charter schools, and private schools globally, Lirvana Labs has also partnered with leaders in the education research space including Stanford University and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund to uncover such outcomes and develop new, cutting-edge technology.
At Chingona Ventures, we are excited about Lirvana Labs’ research-driven approach to education technology as the founding team intelligently harnesses the power of AI to make personalized learning accessible to all. Originally investing in its pre-seed round, we are pleased to continue to back Lirvana Labs at its earliest stages alongside our other portfolio companies in the Future of Learning space, such as Certiverse, Innovare, and Papaya. We continue to have high conviction in the team given their extensive experience in developing new technology and AI, operating high-growth startups, and parenting children themselves. With this raise, Clement and Christie look to accelerate the build of their fine-tuned LLM, secure additional partnerships with schools in Asia and the U.S., and further execute their go-to-market strategy.
We would like to extend our congratulations to Clement, Christie, and the entire team at Lirvana Labs on a successful raise! We look forward to supporting Lirvana Labs as it works to improve learning outcomes for children in all corners of the world through its productive, safe, and educational platform. If you are a parent, caregiver, or school administrator looking to implement a personalized learning solution for your children or students, please click here to learn more about Yeti Confetti Kids by Lirvana Labs, or download the app today!
