Revyze, a ‘TikTok for education’ startup, draws on Duolingo to add bite-sized learning too

Middle and high schoolers are both the easiest and most difficult audience. If you’re developing a neat little video game, chances are they’re willing to download it right away. But if, like the team behind Revyze, you’re working on a learning app, good luck pitching them.

And yet, the French startup has defied the odds and attracted one million users over the last two years. In June, the Revyze app even reached the coveted #1 spot for free downloads in Apple’s App Store.

One-third of all 9th graders in France turned to Revyze for some last-minute schoolwork before the national middle school exam. Around 2,000 content creators have shared 40,000 videos and quizzes in the app. They’ve attracted 150 million views in total.

All that traction has helped the startup’s fundraising pitch. On Monday Revyze announced close of a seed round of €5.5 million ($6 million at current exchange rates) led by Speedinvest and Moonfire.

Motier Ventures, Station F (where the startup is currently headquartered), Supercell co-founder Illka Paananen, King co-founders Riccardo Zacconni and Sebastian Knusson, and Duolingo’s Nickey Skarstad also participated.

Revyze previously raised a €2 million pre-seed round (around $2.2 million) back in 2022.

Non-exam season

Yet it hasn’t been such a smooth and easy ride for Revyze over in the U.S.

When we first covered the startup its pitch was simple: to build the TikTok of education. While there are some great learning videos on TikTok, users’ feeds are diluted with real-time true crime stories and, er, a bunch of everything (imagine this writer waving his hand in the air).

In 2023, the team decided to launch the app in the U.S. TikTok has various challenges in the market, with many U.S. parents having concerns about content issues and local lawmakers also going after TikTok over national security concerns. So Revyze’s positioning as an alternative — education-focused — platform could work. At least on paper.

“I moved to the U.S. exactly one year ago and I spent four months there,” co-founder Guillaume Perrot told TechCrunch. “The aim was to replicate what we’d done in France, to build the company around these periods of stress and exams in the U.S., which is the SAT [the main college admissions test].”

But they found that doesn’t necessarily lead to strong and consistent user growth. Maybe there wasn’t enough content or it wasn’t specific enough for SAT tests. “What we actually learned was that we had to rework the product before we could try and expand to the U.S.” he added.

In particular, while the app worked well right before a stressful exam, U.S. users didn’t open it during the rest of the year. So they went back to the drawing board to find ways to create more consistent engagement.

The Revyze team refined the app experience so that it’s not just a feed of vertical videos that push learning at people who are stressed enough about their looming exams to spend every waking minute learning. Now, content is curated in a way so that you can dip into the app in a more laid back way or be more focused. In other words, it now draws inspiration from both TikTok and Duolingo.

“We’ve launched a product called capsules with the idea that we’ll try to get people to use the app every week for their tests,” Perrot said.

Capsules are designed by Revyze’s top content creators around a single topic. It’s a collection of videos, quizzes and summary sheets. It works a bit like a lesson in Duolingo. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end, which means that you get a sense of achievement when you finish a capsule.

There are also some gamification features around capsules. “You unlock a capsule with coins that you earn by coming back every day — a bit like on Duolingo with the streak flame — and by doing quizzes every day,” co-founder Florent Sciberras told TechCrunch.

“[Capsules] also allow top creators to monetize their content. We’ve introduced a creator monetization program for our top 5% for each universe. Let’s say you live in Michigan and you’ve taken your math exam, which is a bit Michigan-specific. You can say, ‘I know what they need, I can create the content and I’ll earn a proportion of the coins that are spent on my capsule,’” Sciberras said.

While everything is still free, Revyze plans to monetize its app at some point by adding paid access to extra features, such as personalized analytics and social features, and letting users pay to unlock content more quickly.

Right now, Revyze is still very much focused on finding product-market fit and growing its communities of users and content creators. The community of top creators is surprisingly diverse. There are some, top-performing teenagers that want to give back and share knowledge but also some teachers who want to reach a wider audience.

It’s particularly visible when the startup invites its creator community to Station F. “You’ve got the tenth-grader rubbing shoulders with the 45-year-old history teacher from Agen,” Sciberras said. “And they’re all here together with one goal in mind: helping students learn differently.”