Silicon Valley-based AI education startup Pensive (CEO Yang Yoon-seok) announced on the 27th that it has secured $6.87 million (approximately 10 billion won) in seed investment. This round was led by Mayfield, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a 50-year history that has made early investments in Lyft, Hashicorp, and others, with participation from Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Scout Fund, and Base Ventures. Notable entrepreneurs such as Vlad Tenev, co-founder of Robinhood, and Karim Atiyeh, co-founder of Ramp, also joined the investment round.
Pensive is an AI grading and tutoring platform that automates grading tasks for universities running large lectures and provides personalized feedback. Professors and teaching assistants can handle grading and feedback all at once, significantly reducing grading time by up to 10 times compared to traditional methods. Currently, over 1,000 professors and teaching staff at more than 100 universities worldwide, including Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Columbia University, are using the platform.
Since its closed beta launch in February 2025, Pensive has rapidly secured a foothold in the U.S. university market, processing 3 million grading tasks and conducting over 300,000 AI tutoring sessions within a year, demonstrating steep growth. A data science class at UC Berkeley has started group tutoring sessions for the first time using the time saved by implementing Pensive, while in a math class at Columbia University, students have resolved tens of thousands of questions through the AI tutor over a semester.
Pensive was co-founded by CEO Yang Yoon-seok, formerly of Socra AI (formerly Ruid), and CTO Kim Min-jun. CEO Yang Yoon-seok, an AI researcher who published first-author papers at top-tier AI conferences such as EMNLP and NAACL from the age of 21, graduated early on a full scholarship from UC Berkeley. He started the company to solve the structural problems of large lectures he experienced firsthand during his studies. CTO Kim Min-jun, a computer engineering major from Seoul National University, has experience developing and operating AI inference servers for millions of users. Following the seed investment, talents from prestigious U.S. universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Yale, and Dartmouth have joined the team, expanding its capabilities.
CEO Yang Yoon-seok stated, “Starting with solving the repetitive grading tasks that teaching assistants spend the most time on using AI, I want to envision the future of university education in the AI era.”
Based on this investment, Pensive aims to focus on product enhancement and, in the long term, expand into an AI-based personalized learning platform starting from grading.
