Jake Yongjae Lee

As a native of South Korea, a country with one of the highest household expenditures on education in the world, Jake Yongjae Lee experienced the inequality in education first-hand. While attending university as an electrical engineering student, he decided to team up with his school friend Ray Lee (co-CEO & founder of Mathpresso), to build QANDA, a one-to-one Q&A app for students. A year after its launch, Jake noticed the students were regularly asking similar questions and realized that these questions are from a pre-selected number of textbooks. QANDA pivoted to a search model by adopting its own OCR and NLP technology that scans text and formulas and finds detailed solutions from databases within seconds. With the AI-powered search feature, QANDA saw a robust growth and is used by two-thirds of all K-12 students in Korea.

Jake’s vision is to resolve global educational inequality and information asymmetry through AI. QANDA’s strongest database consists of mathemathics, a universally applicable subject that students of all cultures struggle with. QANDA is offered in 7 languages and achieved top seats in over 20 countries’ education charts. Over 85% of QANDA’s users now reside outside of Korea, with its strongest user bases in Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Today, QANDA is used by 12 million students monthly in over 50 countries. Every day, approximately 10 million questions are uploaded worldwide.

QANDA has a distinctive curriculum categorization system that classifies math problems into chapters, sections, and genres. By analyzing the accumulated learning data, QANDA is becoming an integrated learning platform that offers students personalized content, such as byte-sized video lectures and community features that enhances collaborative learning. Mathpresso’s goal is to digitize education and create a sophisticated network, which ultimately will connect all educational content and offer each student essential knowledge.