{"id":413691,"date":"2025-09-10T17:34:20","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T17:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/413691\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T17:34:20","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T17:34:20","slug":"after-selling-to-spotify-anchors-co-founders-are-back-with-oboe-an-ai-powered-app-for-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/413691\/","title":{"rendered":"After selling to Spotify, Anchor’s co-founders are back with Oboe, an AI-powered app for learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

The co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify<\/a> are launching their next project: Oboe<\/a>, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose, simply by entering a prompt.<\/p>\n

These courses can span a variety of verticals, including topics like science, history, foreign language, news, pop culture, preparing for life changes, and more. At launch, Oboe \u2014 a name inspired by the root of the Japanese word<\/a> meaning \u201cto learn\u201d \u2014 will offer nine different course formats. These allow users to learn in the way they prefer, Oboe co-founder Nir Zicherman<\/a> explained to TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

Zicherman founded the company along with Anchor co-founder Michael Mignano<\/a> after leaving Spotify in October 2023 and taking a brief period to recharge. Zicherman said he was inspired to work on an AI educational product after working to scale Spotify\u2019s audiobooks business, which made it easier for people to gain access to high-quality and educational content, as it was bundled with their music subscription.<\/p>\n

Unlike AI chatbots, you don\u2019t have to engage in back-and-forth conversations to learn with Oboe. Instead, you can opt for text and visuals, audio courses, games, interactive tests, and more. <\/p>\n

For those who want to learn on the go, Oboe offers two audio formats. One feels more like listening to a university-style lecture, while the other is akin to Google\u2019s podcast-like NotebookLM, as it features two hosts talking in depth about the topic.<\/p>\n

\"aImage Credits:<\/strong>Oboe<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real magic here comes from an internal architecture that we\u2019ve built that I would describe as a complex, multi-agent architecture that we built from scratch, each part of which is orchestrated to run in parallel as we generate a course,\u201d Zicherman says. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe challenge is, how do you create courses that are both high quality, entirely personalized to what the user wants to see, and also get generated extremely quickly? This all happens within seconds,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe have agents that, in parallel, are responsible for everything from developing the course architecture to developing and verifying the base material that\u2019s being taught, writing the script for the podcast, pulling in real images from the internet \u2014 not AI-generated images, but real images and visuals into the reading formats that we offer,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Some of Oboe\u2019s agents audit the content to ensure the courses are accurate, high-quality, and personalized to what the user wants to learn. <\/p>\n

\"anotherImage Credits:<\/strong>Oboe<\/p>\n

The courses are meant to be lightweight, engaging, and fun. Plus, Oboe\u2019s team is working on a recommendation engine that will help you continually go deeper on a topic, if you prefer. That leaves it up to the user as to whether they want to gain some surface-level knowledge about a new topic or whether they want to get more in-depth.<\/p>\n

This, combined with the variety of formats, will help Oboe appeal to a broader audience, the team believes.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, education conjures up images of more formal academic settings and the types of prescriptive curricula that students are used to as they grow up,\u201d Zicherman tells TechCrunch. \u201cBut the truth is, we are all lifelong learners\u00a0\u2026 So much of the time that we spend on the internet these days is spent trying to better understand things, but the truth is that the internet was built to grab our attention, not to teach effectively.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re very excited to build a platform that is intended to be the one-stop shop to serve that intrinsic thirst for knowledge that exists in every person,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

At launch, users can consume any course created by others for free and can create up to five free courses per month. After that, there are two paid tiers: Oboe Plus, which offers 30 additional courses for $15 per month, and Oboe Pro, which offers 100 courses for $40 per month.<\/p>\n

The service will first be available on the web<\/a> (and mobile web), but native apps for iOS and Android are on the way.<\/p>\n

Oboe is a team of five full-time, including Zicherman. Mignano remains a full-time partner at VC firm Lightspeed but sits on Oboe\u2019s board and shares the co-founder title.<\/p>\n

The startup\u2019s $4 million seed round<\/a> was led by Eniac Ventures, the VC firm that led Anchor\u2019s seed. The round also includes investment from Haystack, Factorial Capital, Homebrew, Offline Ventures, Scott Belsky, Kayvon Beykpour, Nikita Bier, Tim Ferriss, and Matt Lieber.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify are launching their next project: Oboe, an AI-powered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":413692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53834,756,142138,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-413691","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-edtech","11":"tag-learning","12":"tag-oboe","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115181208841427456","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=413691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/413691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=413691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=413691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=413691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}