Medly AI announced in August 2026 it has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Felix Capital, with backing from Eka Ventures, Ada Ventures, and individual investors including Andrey Dobrynin, the chief executive of InvestEngine. The London-based startup has quietly amassed 400,000 users across UK schools, pitching itself as an affordable alternative to the private tutoring market with an AI system that grades practice exam answers and offers tailored feedback for GCSE, A-level, and SAT preparation.
The fresh capital brings the company's total raised to about $12 million, according to media estimates, after closing a £1.7 million round earlier this year led by Eka Ventures. The company declined to disclose its valuation.
Founded in September 2023 by two former NHS doctors, Medly has carved out a niche in an increasingly crowded market of AI tutoring platforms. Its pitch is straightforward: students write exam-style answers on the platform, and the system grades them against official exam board standards, then explains in plain language where points were won or dropped. The interface handles handwritten submissions through tablet recognition and currently covers GCSE, A-level, and International Baccalaureate curricula in the UK. US students can access SAT prep materials now, with AP and ACT support slated for later this year.
Under the hood, the platform runs what the company describes as a proprietary stack of seven large language models, each calibrated for different learning styles and grading rubrics. Longer term, Medly plans to build education-specific models aimed at automated grading and pedagogy. Daily message volume on the platform nears one million, the company said.
The Founders and Their Bet
Dr. Paul Jung and Dr. Kavi Samra, both trained as medical doctors in the UK, left clinical practice to build Medly. Jung was awarded a PhD in psychiatric neuroscience from University College London in 2023 and completed his medical degree there in 2024. Samra graduated from UCL Medicine in 2021. Each holds between 25 and 50 percent of the company, according to filings with Companies House.
"Almost a third of 11 to 16-year-olds receive some form of private tutoring," Jung said in a statement accompanying the announcement. "For those who can't, it's a reinforcer of the status quo."
The comment reflects a tension in UK education policy, where private tutoring has become something of an arms race among middle-class families anxious about league tables and university admissions. Whether an AI tutor can level that field remains an open question, though early data from Medly suggests at least some movement.
Engagement and Early Results
The startup reports that 74 percent of its GCSE 2025 cohort improved by at least one grade, with 41 percent jumping two or more grades, based on self-reported survey data. Physics and English Literature students saw the steepest gains, at 46 percent and 43 percent respectively, according to figures cited by The Cap Table. Retention looks strong: three-quarters of users remain active three months after signing up.
In June, the company posted a preprint to arXiv featuring a dataset of 32,534 double-marked GCSE responses spanning 328 questions across five subjects. A randomized controlled trial involving over 1,000 pupils has wrapped up but has not yet been published, the company confirmed.
Pricing sits at £24.99 per month in the UK, with a freemium tier that caps daily AI interactions. That undercuts traditional tutoring, which often runs north of £40 per hour.
Government Pilot and What Comes Next
Medly secured a £300,000 contract in July as one of eight suppliers tapped for the UK government's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme, a joint initiative of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Education. Running through March 2027, the programme will test AI tutoring platforms with as many as 450,000 disadvantaged pupils across England. Pearson, ElevenLabs, and Eedi are also part of the cohort, according to The Next Web.
Angela Chou of Felix Capital called the investment a natural fit in a LinkedIn post, writing that her firm was "excited to lead Medly AI's $8m Seed." Jon Coker, co-founder of Eka Ventures and a Medly board member, said his team had been "blown away by the speed of progress."
Medly plans to deploy the new capital toward expanding its UK footprint, launching in additional international markets, and developing proprietary models tailored specifically for educational assessment. The company lists backing from startup programmes run by Microsoft and Google on its LinkedIn profile.
Whether Medly can translate government backing and strong early adoption into sustainable scale remains to be seen. The edtech graveyard is littered with startups that won early pilots but struggled to navigate procurement cycles or prove long-term efficacy. For now, though, Medly appears to have momentum and a well-timed pitch in a market where parents are desperate for affordable options and regulators are cautiously curious about AI's role in the classroom.
