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Two former NHS doctors have built an AI exam coach used by 400,000 UK students and secured $8M from Felix Capital to expand into the American SAT market.
- Medly AI closed an $8M seed led by Felix Capital, with Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures returning alongside several angel investors.
- The platform, launched in February 2025, now hosts nearly one million AI tutor messages daily and claims 74% of GCSE users improved by at least one grade.
- Medly was selected in June 2026 from 53 bids for the UK government's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme, run jointly by DSIT and the Department for Education.
Lead
London edtech Medly AI raised an $8M seed round on 19 August 2026, led by Felix Capital, to extend its AI-powered exam preparation platform from UK GCSEs into the US SAT market. The round brings in existing backers Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures, plus a clutch of angels including InvestEngine chief executive Andrey Dobrynin. The raise follows a £1.7M pre-seed from Eka Ventures in early 2025 and comes 18 months after the platform's first public launch.
What Does Medly Actually Do?
Medly marks students' practice answers and explains lost marks through conversation - not through worksheets or multiple-choice drills. The distinction matters: the product sits closer to a human tutor than a flashcard app, and that positions it against both free revision tools and the premium private-tutoring market, where hourly rates in London routinely exceed £50.
Founders Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra met at secondary school at age 11, graduated together from UCL's medical programme, and both practiced as NHS doctors before pivoting to edtech. They have cited their own inability to afford private tutoring as the direct motivation for building Medly. The platform currently covers GCSE, IGCSE, A-Level, and International Baccalaureate subjects, and recently added US SAT preparation. AP and ACT support are planned before the end of 2026.
Why Does Felix Capital Back an Edtech Now?
The round reflects a shift in VC appetite for AI-in-education that struggled to attract institutional money during the 2022-23 downturn. Felix Capital - best known for consumer and creative-tech bets - appears to be reading student engagement numbers as a signal that AI tutoring has crossed a usability threshold that earlier ed-tech waves never reached. Medly reports roughly one million messages exchanged daily and an average session of about one hour per user, which is unusually high retention for an app targeting teenagers.
The company says its user base grew approximately 600% since launch, though the baseline for that figure is the relatively modest post-launch cohort of early 2025. Scaling from 400,000 to millions will require a more complicated marketing and curriculum-localisation effort in the US, where SAT prep is a more crowded and more litigious market than UK exam prep.
Valuation for the round was not disclosed.
What Does 74% Grade Improvement Actually Mean?
Medly's headline efficacy claim - that 74% of students who used the platform for GCSE revision improved by at least one grade - is self-reported and not from a randomised controlled study. The company does not specify the comparison period, the grade distribution of users entering, or attrition among students who used the platform but did not sit their exams.
That caveat aside, the Department for Education's decision to select Medly from 53 competing bids for the AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme provides a degree of external validation. Government procurement of edtech tools typically involves curriculum alignment checks and data-privacy assessments that pure commercial users skip.
Strategic Context
The $8M raise is small relative to US edtech rounds - Khanmigo, Khan Academy's AI tutor, operates from a much larger balance sheet - but it is appropriate for a company still in GCSE-market domination mode before it spreads capital across two examination systems simultaneously. The UK private tutoring market is estimated at around £6B annually; the US test-prep market adds a different scale again.
Competing products in the UK include Revision.ai, Google's Gemini-powered study tools integrated into Classroom, and traditional revision platforms like Save My Exams. None of these has reported comparable daily engagement at Medly's claimed level, which is either a genuine product differentiator or a function of Medly's younger and more sticky user acquisition strategy.
Outlook
Medly enters the US with brand recognition it does not yet have, in a market shaped by incumbents with deep distribution through school districts and tutoring chains. The SAT addition is a logical first step - it is discrete, high-stakes, and used by a demographic comfortable paying for prep tools. Whether the conversational approach that resonates with GCSE students transfers to American high schoolers preparing for a single standardised test is the central product question the $8M will answer. UK growth metrics are strong enough to justify the bet; whether they translate is another matter.
