Ex-Google GM & VP Peeyush Ranjan, Launches AI-First EdTech Startup ‘Fermi.ai’ in the US and India
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fermi.ai, a global AI-first edtech startup headquartered in Singapore, is transforming high-school STEM education with personalized learning. The company has launched its platform through subsidiaries in the United States and India, beginning with Math, Physics, and Chemistry. The initiative is led by Peeyush Ranjan, former GM & VP at Google and Airbnb and former CTO of Walmart-owned Flipkart and emerges from the Meraki Labs ecosystem where Ranjan partners with Mukesh Bansal.
Fermi.ai Logo
While most AI tools focus on speed and answers, Fermi.ai is built to focus on understanding and reasoning. The contrast between a typical AI experience and Fermi.ai’s approach highlights how the platform keeps students engaged in the learning process rather than giving instant answers. Fermi.ai aims to restore the ‘Productive Struggle’ with a focus on Deep learning for students and unprecedented insights for educators.
“AI has made hard things easy for all of us. But as lifelong learners we saw that this process of making hard things easy could hamper learning, unless AI is used the right way,” said Peeyush Ranjan, CEO, Fermi.ai and Partner, Meraki Labs. “The industry has spent years building AI that gives answers. We built Fermi.ai to do the opposite: to protect the ‘productive struggle’ that leads to actual mastery. We want to use AI to keep the brain working, not give it a reason to switch off.”
Built for Deep Learning
Fermi’s platform is built on four core pillars:
Adaptive real-time tutor: Instead of a chatbot that skips directly to the solution, Fermi.ai provides pedagogically sound stepwise coaching that keeps students moving through difficulty without handing them the final answer.
Handwriting First Experience: Built to facilitate the way students actually think when dealing with STEM subjects (equations, free body diagrams, molecular structures). Fermi.ai prioritizes digital ink and stylus input on a smart canvas, ensuring STEM learning remains a natural, tactile reasoning process.
Concept Graph + Question Bank: A deep, exam-aligned question bank (AP, IB, JEE) powered by a curriculum concept graph that ensures the ‘next right problem’ is always within a student’s reach, keeping the student in the zone of productive struggle.
Diagnostics & Analysis: An analytics layer for students and educators that surfaces exactly where reasoning goes sideways, allowing individual students, and the classroom to be helped with specific misconceptions.
The platform provides step-by-step learning for students while giving teachers a tool to gain deeper insights. For students, Fermi.ai shifts the focus from simply finding answers to truly owning concepts. Through three core flows: Homework Assist, Practice Made Personal, and Revise What Counts students move from passive guessing to active engagement. Instead of offering a ‘shortcut’ to the solution, Fermi’s stepwise coach guides reasoning, targets weak spots, and maps a clear path toward personalized goals. For educators, Fermi.ai delivers Classroom Command through a simple promise: ‘See Every Student. Reach Every Struggle.’ By highlighting questions, a student never asked and pinpointing exactly where reasoning faltered. The platform helps teachers turn ‘silent struggle’ into targeted breakthroughs. This unprecedented visibility extends a teacher’s impact beyond the classroom, ensuring each lesson starts exactly where students actually are, not where the syllabus says they should be.
“We have entered an era where AI can solve any equation, but it can’t yet explain why a student’s logic faltered at step three,” added Mukesh Bansal, Partner, Meraki Labs. “Fermi.ai isn’t here to give answers; it’s here to provide the map and the mirror – showing students how they think and giving teachers the visibility to lead them back to the path of mastery.”
Before its public launch, Fermi.ai conducted a three-month pilot with 79 students, covering more than 15,000 concept tests. The results revealed a clear ‘Mastery Curve,’ showing how students progressed from initial struggle to greater independence. Those who initially failed to grasp a concept (starting score ≤ 2/10) improved by an average of 4.68 points by their final attempt, with nearly 9 out of 10 sequences showing consistent upward progress. Overall mastery scores across all subjects rose by 2.6 points from students’ first 20% of practice attempts to their last 20%. Students who engaged heavily with the platform, completing 100 or more practice attempts, showed even larger gains, +2.82 points, while reliance on hints dropped by 21%, highlighting how repeated, guided practice fosters deeper understanding and independence.
The platform is cloud-based, starting with high-school Math, Physics, and Chemistry, with more subjects to follow. Students can get started at fermi.ai, while educators and schools can join the 2026 pilot program at fermi.ai/educators.
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