Derek Haoyang Li – Founder & CEO of Squirrel AI

By rtorresc on September 29, 2022

For the founder’s parade, (and doubling up as Pitch Pool material) I chose the CEO of a company I have been following closely for the last few years: Squirrel AI, based in China. The CEO and founder is Derek Haoyang Li.

According to Analytics India magazine, “Squirrel AI Learning is the first pure-play AI-powered adaptive education provider in China. It uses AI to tailor lesson plans to each individual student by using some of the largest databases.” (Gopani, 2021)

I first came across Squirrel AI while attending a virtual technology conference in Toronto: Collision 2020. There, I heard Li speak live as one of the panelist during the conference. (Li, 2020) Li is a very compelling speaker, and he pitches his AI product as a solution to personalize learning on a massive scale–a problem he says cannot be solved with human teachers overwhelmed with large class sizes. The general “gist” of the Squirrel AI product is that each subject matter (e.g. Math, English, Biology, etc.) is broken down into tiny individual content components within that subject, and then the AI system assesses “gaps in knowledge” from the student, serving them increasingly challenging content to move forward or back-tracking to fill in the gaps. Overall, the system is a massive micro-learning platform, (however contradictory that might sound).

The first time I heard Li, I was struck at how differently Western and Eastern cultures view education and learning. For those who have taught in Asia, you may recognize a different understanding of what learning can be and how to achieve it, and it looks very different than what we as westerners may be familiar with as learning. This type of content-centric educational modality is common in Asia, where cram schools and standardized test/examinations abound, and where there is a different view of “content absorption” as learning than there is in the West.

In addition, the Asian market, and China specifically, represent the single largest body of students in the world, for both K-12 (230M students + 12M teachers as per China Education Resources) (2010) and college-grads (240 Million as per the Global Times)(2022) .

I sometimes wonder how long Western nations will continue to believe the narrative that they are likely to dominate the long-term intellectual or financial battle in the educational realm. This is hard to envision considering that most other nations combined can’t come even close to the number of Chinese and East-Asian individuals who are educated under these non-western systems. These grads continue to enter (and often thrive) on the world educational stage. Estimates of other nations’ K-12 student populations hover at:

  • USA – 77 Million (US Census 2019)
  • India – 253 Million (Ernst & Young, 2014)
  • All of the EU – 73 Million (Eurostat, 2021)
  • All of LatAm – 114 Mllion (Unicef, 2021)

Regardless of one’s opinion of East vs. West ideas of learning, I am intrigued by Squirrel AI because it represents a widely successful education venture that was launched, operates and continues to grow outside of Western educational “canons” or markets. Is this what we in the West consider learning? I don’t know. But this is the type of startup that venture capitalists and investors LOVE: Low personnel (>25 employees), large potential automation and scalability, and a huge market that limits competitors. Plus a compelling story of technology coming to the rescue of students during pandemic times. The founders of Squirrel AI have recurrently raised capital since its start, and most recently have hired prominent names in AI research, such as Dan Bindman (one of the leads for ALEKS) and have partnered with respected institutions like Carnegie Mellon (Spice, 2019) to co-develop AI assessment systems.

Data from Crunchbase (2022). Funds raised by Squirrel AI since starting in 2014.

  • 2015 raised $4,500,000 / Seed from Minhong Yu and 2 other investors
  • 2016 raised $11,300,000 / Angel from CASH Capital and 4 other investors
  • 2017 raised $22,500,000 / Series A
  • 2018 raised $93,000,000 / Series B from China-ASEAN etst Investment Cooperation Fund and 3 other investors
  • 2021 raised an undisclosed amount / Series C from CITIC Securities and 2 other investors

Current investment for Squirrel AI is estimated at $141.3 Million. (Gopani, 2022).

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One response to “Derek Haoyang Li – Founder & CEO of Squirrel AI”

  1. trevor laughlin
    trevor laughlin September 29, 2022 at 2:30 pm |

    I’m interested in this in terms of microlearning for language. Some online languages assessments say that they also follow this type of AI learning pattern to determine what skills learners need to master before moving on

    ( 0 upvotes and 0 downvotes )

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