After selling Anchor to Spotify, co-founders reunite to build AI educational startup Oboe
The co-founders who sold their last startup to Spotify are working on a new project: an AI-powered educational startup called Oboe backed by a $4 million
The co-founders who sold their last startup to Spotify are working on a new project: an AI-powered educational startup called Oboe backed by a $4 million seed investment. The new company, hailing from Nir Zicherman and Michael Mignano, aims to democratize access to learning the way that their prior startup, Anchor, made it possible for anyone to create a podcast. That is, Oboe intends to produce a user-friendly interface that helps people accomplish the task at hand — in this case, expanding their knowledge via a combination of AI technology, audio, and video.
“This idea is something that Mike and I have been talking about for a long time now, because we have both felt for a while that there is a really big opportunity in the education space — much bigger than I think a lot of people realize,” Zicherman says.
After taking a brief period to recharge after leaving Spotify in October 2023, Zicherman was soon ready to roll up his sleeves and build something new with a small team, he says, similar to Anchor’s early days. He also took inspiration from his work at Spotify, where he had spent the last few years building out its audiobooks business and scaling it to more markets.
“One of the big things … that drew me to audiobooks, as a business, and as a product, was this idea of enabling so many more people than ever before to get access to incredible, high-quality content, including educational content and making that really ubiquitous,” he notes.
Oboe looks to expand on that mission, but not via audiobooks.
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