Buddy.AI’s Founder Turns His American Dream into a Movement Impacting 22 Million Lives

When Ivan Crewkov’s smart speaker startup crashed and burned after Amazon launched Echo, he thought his American dream was over. Moving from Siberia to Silicon Valley only to watch his company Cubic.AI collapse wasn’t exactly the California dream he’d imagined. Little did he know that his daughter’s struggle to speak English in a Mountain View preschool would spark an AI revolution that’s now teaching 22 million children annually and has raised $13 million in venture funding.

“It was a disaster,” Crewkov recalls about his first startup’s demise in 2014. “It made zero sense to compete with Amazon and Google; we ended up selling the company.” Just one week before their planned Kickstarter launch, Amazon had unveiled Echo, instantly rendering Cubic.AI obsolete.

But sometimes, the best ideas emerge from our darkest moments. After relocating his family from Siberia to Mountain View, California, Crewkov watched his 4-year-old daughter Sofia struggle for months to make friends at preschool because she couldn’t speak English. “Sofia struggled to begin speaking English for the first 3-5 months in preschool,” Crewkov shares. “We were worried because she couldn’t find friends and play with most of her peers because of the language.”

The Broken System That Inspired an AI Revolution

Like many desperate parents, Crewkov turned to every available option: language apps, online tutoring platforms, virtual teachers. What he discovered was a deeply flawed system.

“It became clear that language apps for kids do not teach to speak, and language apps for grown-ups like Duolingo do not work for children because of the UX,” Crewkov explains. “As I observed Sofia learn with live tutors virtually, I saw the benefit of 1:1 attention and active speaking practice, but also saw the shortcomings of these programs in general.”

The problem ran deeper than just accessibility. “As they scale, many of the Online Tutoring Platforms and Online Schools have to hire people without pedagogical backgrounds, skills in teaching children, or even a proper English proficiency level,” Crewkov notes. “Unfortunately, on many platforms, tutors basically work like bots.”

When Innovation Meets Necessity

That’s when the lightbulb moment struck. If tutors were already following scripts, why not create an AI that could do the same thing, but better, cheaper, and at scale? Thus, Buddy.ai was born – though bringing it to life proved far more challenging than anticipated.

“We thought we would be able to get the product to market within six months, a goal that was naive,” Crewkov admits. The reality? It took years of intensive development, particularly around one crucial challenge: teaching AI to understand children’s voices.

“We are trying to understand a 4-year-old Brazilian girl who is trying to say her first words in English at the same time as a 4-year-old Arabic girl from Saudi Arabia,” Crewkov explains. “Completely different accents and completely different languages.”

The team spent four years developing their proprietary Speech Recognition (BSR) technology, building a database of over 25,000 hours of children’s speech. They had to navigate complex regulations like COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) while creating an AI that could understand accented English from young learners worldwide.

The Technology Behind the Magic

Buddy isn’t just another chatbot. It’s a sophisticated multimodal AI tutor built on three core technologies:

• BSR (Buddy’s Speech Recognition): A proprietary engine specifically designed for accented children’s speech
• BLM (Buddy’s Language Model): A specialized conversational AI engine for children that’s safe, fast, and free to operate
• BABE (Buddy’s Avatar Behavior Engine): Technology that generates the character’s visual behavior based on conversation context

“From a psychology of learning standpoint, the virtual talking character is an embodiment of the teacher,” explains Dr. Alex Desatnik from University College London. “This approach creates an effect called epistemic trust, strengthening the student’s motivation and engagement, and improving the learning outcomes.”

From Kitchen Table to Global Phenomenon

The results have been nothing short of extraordinary. Buddy.ai has amassed:

• Over 55 million total app downloads
• 22 million annual active students
• 93% year-over-year revenue growth
• 350% increase in US users aged 4-7 for their Early Learning Course
• Strong presence in Latin America, with nearly half of users from the region

Perhaps most remarkably, children themselves have become Buddy’s biggest advocates. “Fun fact: Buddy’s mobile App was downloaded 22 million times in 2023, and over 70% of these downloads were made by children,” Crewkov reveals. “For children, our App is a game where they play with Buddy, their talking virtual friend and a popular Youtuber. Children download the App and convince parents to pay for a subscription, explaining that Buddy is a teacher.”

The $13 Million Vote of Confidence

Investors have taken notice. The company just secured an $11.2 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, bringing their total funding to $13 million. But success didn’t come easily – Crewkov and his team pitched to 186 investors to close this round.

“We were specifically interested in finding a fund with expertise in the gaming field and that’s why we are so in love with BITKRAFT,” Crewkov explains. “Children treat Buddy as a game. A fun fact is most of the downloads are actually made by children who just want to play with buddy.”

The Future of Global Education?

With a worldwide teacher shortage of 69 million educators, Buddy.ai might be the scalable solution education desperately needs. “AI tutors are the best and the only scalable way to solve humanity’s #1 educational problem – the global teacher shortage,” Crewkov asserts. “For subjects that require 1:1 tutoring, like language learning, the problem is much worse.”

But don’t worry about AI replacing teachers. “Buddy works to help teachers, not to replace them,” Crewkov emphasizes. “We want to give power to school teachers. Buddy is like a team of tutors and teacher assistants, working individually with every child in the class and reporting to the class teacher.”

The company is now expanding beyond language learning, recently launching their School Preparation Curriculum for U.S. children. They’re also forging partnerships with schools, starting with pilot programs in Brazil and discussions with dozens more educational institutions.

“Regarding our future, Buddy started as a language learning tutor, but in the longer term, it will become an AI tutoring platform teaching a wide variety of subjects to children under 12,” Crewkov shares. “We see Buddy as the child’s learning assistant, growing up with a child from 3 to 4 years old and teaching multiple courses over many years.”

The impact is already visible in Crewkov’s own family. His younger daughter Alisa, who started using Buddy at three years old, demonstrates the platform’s potential. “When Alisa started learning with Buddy, she had several speech issues, so Buddy did not understand her most of the time. But after a couple of weeks of practice, not only her English but her speech improved, as she tried her best to make Buddy understand her.”

From a father’s concern for his daughter’s education to a global education technology leader, Buddy.ai is proving that sometimes the most powerful innovations come from the most personal places. And with millions of children already learning from their AI buddy, this might just be the beginning of an educational revolution that could transform how the next generation learns.