Jerome Pesenti
Sizzle AI, a New York-based company creating direct-to-learner AI-products, just raised $7.5M in Seed funding. In conjunction with the announcement, Jerome Pesenti, CEO and Founder Sizzle AI, replied to our questions about the company, the app, the funding, and future plans.
FinSMEs: Hi Jerome, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
- Prior to founding Sizzle, I served as VP of AI at Meta, focusing on making Meta products safer and more valuable through the use of AI. MetaAI’s main contributions during my time there were PyTorch, AI for content moderation, very large models for ads and recommendations, and Facebook AI Research (FAIR)’s research breakthroughs.
- Before Meta,I was co-CEO of BenevolentAI, which develops novel AI technologies that will change how drugs are discovered. Prior to that, I led the global team of researchers and software engineers within IBM Watson developing state-of-the-art software in question and answering, dialog, speech, natural language processing, and automated machine translation.
I joined IBM through its acquisition of Vivisimo, the search and text analytics company I co-founded in 2000. Vivisimo’s technology was based on the machine learning research I conducted with my co-founders in the CS department of CMU from 1998 to 2000.
- On the policy side, I have served as co-chair of an independent review on the growth of AI commissioned by the UK government. This report led to a sector deal
and most of its recommendations have been since implemented by the UK government. - Throughout my career and through my research, I have been a lifelong learner. I am also the father of four kids – from elementary to college age – and experienced first hand the challenges students face in staying up with the classroom teachings. After leaving Meta, I was inspired to leverage AI to truly help students and non-students no matter what kind of background they come from, school they attend or how many resources they have.
- I felt that applications of AI haven’t had a clear positive impact on people’s lives. Using it to transform learning is an opportunity to change that.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Sizzle. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
- In the war for attention, learning/education is outgunned. Social media platforms leverage millions of creators and advanced AI to create ultra-personalized, highly retentive, and incredibly engaging experiences. By contrast, online teaching today leverages a tiny subset of the available educational content through curriculums that are neither personalized nor optimized for engagement. The resulting experience is often considered boring by students, and the majority of the online learning platforms have not seen retention higher than the single-digit range, and course completion is just 3%.
- Our mission at Sizzle AI is to make learning amazing for everyone – by using AI to make learning interactive, personalized and engaging.
- We are starting on that journey by launching an app that helps students by providing guidance to solve step-by-step problems in all STEM subjects.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
- Sizzle is a free, interactive app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help learners work through any problem, including word problems, step by step.
- It is interactive because rather than simply providing answers to problems, Sizzle guides students through each step of solving a problem, using positive and reaffirming language to build confidence and excitement in learning. Students can also ask questions to better understand concepts and get answers right away.
- Additionally, unlike most learning apps that require users to pay after the first handful of uses, Sizzle is free to use, with no limits on its usage. Sizzle is available to learners of all backgrounds to benefit from its personalized, learning-first focus.
- The longer term vision for Sizzle is to go beyond students to support lifelong learning and curiosity for all ages. Sizzle will enable users to learn what they want, how they want – in a highly personalized, social learning platform.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
- Sizzle AI has raised a total of $7.5M in seed funding, led by Owl Ventures and with participation from 8VC.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
- Sizzle is pre-launch.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
- In the next few months, we plan to add a number of new features to the app to help students use Sizzle for more than step-by-step problems. We want to help students build mastery of topics they struggle with, get feedback on their knowledge/skill level and have a safe environment where they can learn at their own pace, ask questions without judgment and gain confidence. Overall, the goal is to give learners the tools they need to become masters of a subject by learning it, not just give answers.
