Medly AI raises $8M to bring AI-powered tutoring to more students

Medly AI, the London-based edtech outfit founded by two UCL medicine graduates, has closed an $8 million seed round to push its AI tutoring platform further into the UK market and beyond. Felix Capital led the round, with existing backers Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures returning, alongside a handful of angel investors including InvestEngine's Andrey Dobrynin and LearnLaunch's Jean Hammond.

What Medly has built isn't a single chatbot bolted onto a homework app. Founders Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra combined seven different large language models with ideas pulled from neuroscience and teaching theory, aiming for something that actually adapts to how a given student learns rather than spitting out generic answers. Students work through practice questions and get immediate feedback, down to where they're leaving marks on the table. The platform also handles handwriting recognition, so a kid working through a chemistry equation or a maths proof can scrawl it out on a tablet instead of typing.

The traction numbers are the real story here. Since launching in February 2025, Medly says it has pulled in more than 400,000 users in the UK alone, with students spending roughly an hour a day on the platform. That's a startup barely a year old finding genuine daily habit-forming use, which is rarer than the funding headline itself. The company also claims GCSE students using the platform saw improved results, and it's now running a trial with over 1,000 students to get harder data on whether that holds up at scale.

Jung frames the business less as a tech play and more as an access play. Nearly a third of 11 to 16 year olds in the UK get some form of private tutoring, and he's blunt about what that means: it's a real edge for families who can pay for it, and a quiet way of locking in advantage for those who can't. Whether AI tutoring actually closes that gap or just becomes another tier of it is an open question, but it's clearly the pitch investors bought into.

The money will go toward growing the UK user base, building out proprietary models for marking and pedagogy, and funding further research into whether the platform moves the needle on actual outcomes, not just engagement. Medly has also started moving into the US, with SAT prep already live and AP and ACT support planned by the end of the year — the first real test of whether this works outside the UK's exam system.