Sometimes the most genuine projects emerge from gaps we identify in our own lives or in the society around us. And maybe this should be our focus as a society: to use all the technology at our disposal to solve problems that were almost impossible to address before.
Medly AI, a London exam-prep platform built by two former NHS doctors, has raised an $8m seed round led by Felix Capital, with existing backers Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures returning.
A group of angels joined, among them InvestEngine chief executive Andrey Dobrynin, Creator Fund venture partner Al Giles, LearnLaunch general partner Jean Hammond, and Episode 1 general partner Hector Mason.
The money follows a £1.7m round announced in February 2025 and led by Eka, and a government contract that is arguably the more interesting of the two.
In June, Medly was one of eight suppliers picked from 53 bids for the AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme, run by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology with the Department for Education as delivery partner.
Each winner takes £300,000 excluding VAT for research contracts running to 31 March 2027, aimed at raising attainment among disadvantaged pupils in England. Pearson, ElevenLabs, and Eedi are also on the list.
Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra met at 11, in their first year of secondary school, and both went on to read medicine at UCL. Jung, who grew up in Northolt, has a doctorate in psychiatric neuroscience; Samra, who grew up on a council estate in Slough, taught at UCL Medical School as an honorary fellow.
Yet, neither could afford a private tutor as a schoolchild, which is the origin story the company tells and, unusually for a founding myth, also the market thesis.
The product marks practice answers and explains where the marks went, through a conversational interface rather than a worksheet.
Medly says it runs on a proprietary combination of seven large language models tuned to read learning styles and adjust feedback accordingly. Handwriting recognition lets students work with a stylus on a tablet, which matters more than it sounds in maths and chemistry, where the working is the answer.
The platform covers GCSEs, A-levels, and the IB in the UK, and has recently added the SAT in the US, with APs and ACTs planned before the year is out.
It also intends to build its own models for UK and EEA marking and pedagogy rather than renting general-purpose ones indefinitely.
On outcomes, Medly says 74% of students who used it for last summer’s GCSEs improved by at least one grade, and 41% improved by two or more. Those figures come from a survey of its own users rather than an independent assessment.
The company puts the largest subject gains at 46% and 43%, though its own website attributes the 46% figure to English Literature while the announcement attributes it to Physics.
Growth claims carry a similar caveat. Medly says it has passed 400,000 users in the UK alone, a number that sits awkwardly beside the “300,000+ students” its consumer site currently advertises.
Exam students spend about an hour a day on it, according to the company, exchanging close to a million messages daily.
In June, three members of the team published a preprint benchmarking 32,534 double-marked GCSE responses across 328 questions and five subjects, and found that leading off-the-shelf models agreed with examiners at least as closely as two examiners agreed with each other.
The paper tests general-purpose models rather than Medly’s own marking stack, and has not been peer reviewed. A randomised controlled trial of more than 1,000 pupils in lower-attaining schools is complete but unpublished.
“Almost a third of 11 to 16-year-olds receive some form of private tutoring,” Jung said. *“For those who can afford it, it’s a powerful advantage. For those who can’t, it’s an equally powerful reinforcer of the status quo.” *
Angela Chou, the Felix Capital investor who led the deal, cited the founders’ personal stories and the pace at which they had scaled.
Ada Ventures, whose Inclusive Alpha fund backed the pre-seed, has stayed in, as has Eka, whose founder Jon Coker said the firm had been *“blown away by the speed of progress”. *
The field has filled in around them, with Smartschool selling a maths reasoning engine into US districts and a growing number of startups betting that education-specific models beat general chatbots in the classroom.
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