koalluh.com
Koalluhâs AI story generator gives kids the power to make & share quality children's stories.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
N/A | Early VC | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Formerly known as Koalluh, LitLab.ai is an educational technology company founded in 2022 by Varun Gulati, Sebastian Belmar, and Christie Chu. The company, headquartered in Atlanta, GA, operates within the EdTech and AI sectors, focusing on improving early childhood literacy for K-2 students. LitLab.ai has secured seed funding from investors including Better Ventures, Edovate Capital, and Reach Capital.
The founding team combines deep experience in education and technology. CEO Varun Gulati previously co-founded UClass, an edtech startup acquired by Renaissance Learning, and served as a math teacher with Teach for America. Christie Chu, Head of Learning, brings direct classroom experience as a veteran educator, while Head of Engineering Sebastian Belmar has a background in software engineering at several mission-driven tech companies. This blend of expertise underpins the company's mission to address reading proficiency challenges.
LitLab.ai's core offering is a platform designed to help educators create engaging and curriculum-aligned reading materials. It targets the supplemental English language arts market, which includes an estimated 19 million children in the U.S. not reading at their grade level. The business model is subscription-based, offering affordable premium memberships for schools and districts, with pricing positioned to be significantly lower than comparable tools. The platform can be integrated with existing school systems through SSO and rostering with Clever and ClassLink.
The product features an AI-powered generator that allows teachers and students to create personalized, decodable stories based on specific interests, characters, and settings. A key technical differentiator is its proprietary Scope & Sequence Alignment engine, which ensures generated texts adhere to specific phonics rules and skill progressions, achieving a decodability score of over 85%, compared to general AI models. In addition to the custom story generator, the platform provides a library of over 1,000 pre-made decodable texts and a student practice module with voice recording for oral fluency analysis. The company emphasizes a multi-layered safety approach, using controlled and filtered inputs, purpose-built AI models trained on age-appropriate text, and output safety checks to ensure a secure learning environment.
Keywords: LitLab.ai, Koalluh, educational technology, AI in education, early literacy, reading proficiency, decodable texts, phonics instruction, K-2 education, personalized learning, student engagement, AI story generator, fluency practice, classroom tools, Varun Gulati, edtech startup, reading intervention, curriculum supplement, language arts, teacher resources