Nhon Ma was a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District in South Los Angeles until 1996.

Through a program called A Better Chance, he received a scholarship that allowed him to attend a college preparatory school. The experience was, as he describes it, “eye-opening.” Ma was surrounded by mostly affluent students who left school only to go home to private tutors who were able to personalize their education and help them understand and advance in otherwise difficult-to-understand concepts.

“Those who I grew up with in South Central L.A. didn’t have that luxury,” Ma said. “And always in the back of my mind was the incredible power of these resources, specifically tutoring, and how they can actually help students.”

After receiving his undergraduate degree in economics and psychology and moving on from stints at Google and various startups, he met Alex Lee, who tutored students pro bono in South L.A. while he was studying at the University of Southern California. In 2019, the pair created Numerade, an artificial intelligence-powered tutoring and studying platform.

“We came together to ensure that we actually focus our energies towards closing these educational gaps as relates to education, and specifically supplemental education,” Ma said.

The edtech resurgence

The Pasadena-based company, which announced a slew of new AI product offerings in February, is part of the edtech renaissance taking the venture world by storm. When Silicon Valley first set their eyes on classrooms – which were riddled with low testing scores, faculty burnout and budget cuts – technology seemed like a promising solution to longstanding issues plaguing schools and their students.

When tech companies reached out to schools during the pandemic and offered tools to facilitate remote education, schools agreed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. But schools could not say conclusively whether those tech platforms were useful to students. Venture dollars follow the frenzied state of education technology adoption – 2021 ended with 1,754 edtech deals. Two years later, in the aftermath of these platforms’ successes and failures, there were only 143 edtech deals.

“I think that one of the things that the tech sector has done is they’ve been responsive to what they perceive to be the needs of educators,” said Stephen Aguilar, an associate professor of education at the University of Southern California. “When a lot of students were going online especially during the pandemic, there was a push to have ways for students to access content or for asynchronous instruction.”

But that is starting to change. As large language models and AI evolve, a new wave of edtech platforms is taking advantage of a new resource that may be able to do what previous iterations of edtech couldn’t. The British government announced it would invest around $2 million in developing teaching tools using AI in late 2023. The global edtech market is expected to grow 13.4% between 2024 and 2030, according to Grand View Research. So far in 2025, the median edtech deal was $1.58 million – the largest median edtech deal ever.

“Edtech is sort of an amorphous sector where there’s just a lot of different products that serve a lot of different purposes,” Aguilar said. “In general, I think that the edtech industry makes OK products. I don’t think any of them are Earth-shattering. A few of them are incorporating some sort of AI into what they’re doing with different varying levels of success.”

The new generation of edtech

Companies like Numerade are trying to prove their success. Numerade’s core product, an AI tutoring platform called ACE, was developed by recruiting tutors to make short-form videos and create a proprietary data set that is fed through every large language model on the market. The AI is continually tested for accuracy, and the company also tests LLMs against each other to see which ones perform best at certain subjects.

In February, the company unveiled new features to its core platform. Scribe records lectures and takes notes on behalf of students. AI-powered flashcards can be generated from students’ notes to help them study. ACE is now able to ingest learning materials and entire textbooks, strengthening the data set and relying less on the generic data baked into these LLMs.

Numerade has raised $26 million since it was founded in. Culver City-based Everydae, a gamified learning platform meant to train students for standardized tests, raised $325,000 in October, per Pitchbook. In December, Playa Vista-based Nectir, which uses artificial intelligence to help students answer questions about study materials, raised $4 million.

“The best way to iterate on a product is to understand that people are very problem aware. They’re not necessarily solution aware – they don’t know what the solution needs to be to their problems, but they can really, really define their problems for you and a problem well defined as a problem half-solved,” said Kavitta Ghai, Nectir’s chief executive. “Our job as founders is to go in and ask them what are the biggest pain points that you’re facing?”

Edtech’s uncertain future

But edtech’s shaky reputation precedes the new entrants. And edtech operates in a difficult space – one that still requires companies to make money for their venture investors and their shareholders while also committing to something rather honorable: educating children.

“It’s a bit tough to reconcile the two,” Ma said. “I think education should be a public good, but VCs are investing in us obviously for a return.”

Numerade operates primarily as a business-to-consumer platform, primarily because the company can deploy assets to the market quicker, receive feedback to improve faster and, for the venture companies that invest in it, employ a subscription model that drives revenue. That being said, the company does offer its product for free to certain Title I schools.

“Education just should be a human right,” Ma said. “All humans, all students should have access to the best educational opportunities. But the reality is that that isn’t the case.”