After selling Anchor to Spotify, co-founders reunite to build AI educational startup Oboe

The co-founders who sold their last startup to Spotify are working on a new project: an AI-powered educational startup called Oboe backed by a $4 million seed investment. The new company, hailing from Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, aims to democratize access to learning the way that their prior startup, Anchor, made it possible for anyone to create a podcast. That is, Oboe intends to produce a user-friendly interface that helps people accomplish the task at hand — in this case, expanding their knowledge via a combination of AI technology, audio, and video.

“This idea is something that Mike and I have been talking about for a long time now, because we have both felt for a while that there is a really big opportunity in the education space — much bigger than I think a lot of people realize,” Zicherman says.

After taking a brief period to recharge after leaving Spotify in October 2023, Zicherman was soon ready to roll up his sleeves and build something new with a small team, he says, similar to Anchor’s early days. He also took inspiration from his work at Spotify, where he had spent the last few years building out its audiobooks business and scaling it to more markets.

“One of the big things … that drew me to audiobooks, as a business, and as a product, was this idea of enabling so many more people than ever before to get access to incredible, high-quality content, including educational content and making that really ubiquitous,” he notes.

Oboe looks to expand on that mission, but not via audiobooks.

Instead, the team envisions a product that would allow more people to engage with “active learning journeys,” as the company calls it, by offering learning tools that optimize the development of a curriculum and personalize those to the way the individual user learns most effectively.

The tools offered will be available across platforms and will involve native applications, similar to existing online learning services.

However, the startup intends to differentiate itself from others in the space by leveraging AI to both customize the curriculum materials and enable an interactive experience. For instance, synthetic AI voices will be a part of the offering. Meanwhile, machine learning combined with Oboe’s back-end architecture will help to personalize how the material is presented and will improve over time.

Because AI tends to hallucinate or cite bad information, part of Oboe’s secret sauce will be focused on ensuring the content is accurate, high-quality, and scalable.

In part, Oboe will rely on third-party foundational AI models, but the team is also undertaking a “significant” amount of work in-house to build its data architecture and optimize the curriculum on a per-user basis, Zicherman says.

“This product is not one of these thin wrappers around existing LLMs. There’s a lot more happening under the hood,” he teases.

In addition, access to the material will be made available across different formats. When you can’t look at a screen — like if out for a jog or driving to work — you could tune in via audio. Other times, you may be watching videos, using an app, or engaging with a website.

Initially, Oboe will target just a few verticals, ranging from someone teaching themselves programming to a college student supplementing their classroom experience with more materials, for instance. These debut courses will focus on learners older than the K through 12 demographic, but Oboe’s eventual goal is to fulfill its mission of “making humanity smarter.” (A tall order, indeed.) That includes the K through 12 and higher-ed space, as well as those upskilling for their careers, or just engaged on their own to learn something new, like playing a new instrument. (Fun fact: Not only is the Oboe the instrument an orchestra tunes to, it’s also the root of the Japanese word meaning “to learn.”)

New York-based Oboe isn’t yet ready to share much more in terms of product details, but it has raised funding from a crowd of investors, including those who have worked with Zicherman and Mignano previously. Mignano will remain a full-time partner at Lightspeed but will serve on the board of this new company and support Zicherman in his role of CEO, he says.

“In my co-founding role at Oboe, Nir and I have worked closely together to set the company up for success through its initial strategy and product direction,” Mignano tells TechCrunch. “My partners at Lightspeed are super supportive of me being both investor and founder — there’s a long history of our investors starting or incubating their own companies. Nir and I were thrilled to raise this initial round from a number of amazing seed funds and angels — many who backed us previously at Anchor,” he adds.

Oboe’s $4 million seed round was led by Eniac Ventures — the VC firm that led Anchor’s seed. The round also includes investment from Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.