Our YC Demo Day Experience: A Few Thoughts

What inspired you to start your company, and what problem are you solving?

Online exam prep has existed for decades, but most of the major players focus almost exclusively on a handful of high-volume exams — all of them in the US. That leaves an enormous blind spot: millions of students around the world sit important exams each year with almost no quality digital preparation available to them. That's the gapEdumentis was built to fill. Using AI, we develop high-quality prep materials for exams that have been largely ignored by the big education companies. Advanced language models let us reach the vast long tail of exams that were previously too niche or too costly to serve — which, taken together, represents the majority of exam-takers globally.

My personal motivation for building Edumentisruns deep. I come from a family of academics, and I spent a lot of my early years involved in competitions and education-related projects. It's something I've cared about for most of my life.

How are you leveraging AI, machine learning, or similar technologies in your product?

Our focus is on exams that have traditionally been underserved, and recent AI progress has made it genuinely possible to reach them well. We use AI in two core ways:

Content development and refinement: AI helps us produce and improve learning materials, making them clearer and more effective for students. Adaptive personalisation: we shape each student's preparation path around their specific weaknesses and learning profile, so the time they invest yields the most useful results.

How do you envision the future of your industry, and where do you see your company fitting in?

The way we educate and assess people isn't fixed — it has always been shaped by the tools available at a given moment. Classroom-based teaching spread across Europe in the 17th century as a way to bring education to more people. Formal exams emerged as a means of predicting job performance — whether as a doctor, an engineer, or anything else. Multiple-choice questions were introduced in the early 20th century to enable fair, scalable grading.

AI now gives us the tools to do both things better: teach more effectively and evaluate more accurately.

Most exams today still rely on multiple-choice formats, but we expect that to change. AI will enable more nuanced assessments — written responses, structured interviews, even behavioural evaluation. Becoming a doctor will always require strong foundational knowledge, but future assessments will also need to measure qualities like empathy and clinical judgement. Edumentisaims to be at the front of that shift — not just by supporting today's exams, but by evolving alongside tomorrow's.

Can you describe a pivotal moment during the YC program that changed the trajectory of your startup?

YC was formative on every level, but one moment in particular stands out. It was when Paul Graham's classic advice — talk to your users — finally clicked for us in a hands-on way. We launched an exam in Peru and made it our mission to speak directly with as many students as possible, even with no shared language between us. That effort to close the gap and genuinely listen shaped how we think about building the product.