London edtech Medly AI has closed an $8m (£5.9m) seed round led by Felix Capital, with existing backers Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures following on 18 months after the platform launched.
Medly was founded in February 2025 by Dr Paul Jung and Dr Kavi Samra, UCL medicine graduates who met at secondary school aged 11 and left NHS careers to build the company. It claims to have assembled a user base of more than 400,000 people in the UK since launch.
The seed round totals $8m, equivalent to £5.9m or €6.89m. Felix Capital led. Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures, both already on the register, participated again, preserving their positions rather than being diluted out by the new lead.
A cluster of angels also came in: Andrey Dobrynin, chief executive of InvestEngine; Al Giles, venture partner at Creator Fund; Jean Hammond, general partner at LearnLaunch Accelerator; and Hector Mason, general partner at Episode 1 Ventures. Valuation and dilution were not disclosed.
The product is an exam preparation tutor built on a proprietary combination of seven large language models. It tracks progress, infers how an individual student learns and tailors the style of feedback accordingly, delivering marking and mark-scheme guidance through a conversational interface. Handwriting recognition lets students work with a stylus for subjects such as maths and chemistry. Medly covers GCSE, IGCSE, A-Level and International Baccalaureate syllabuses, with a curriculum-agnostic product, Medly Open, aimed at university students.
The outcome data is the commercial case. Among students who prepared for GCSEs on the platform last summer, Medly reports that 74% improved by at least one grade and 41% by two or more. The largest gains came in Physics and English Literature, up 46% and 43% respectively.
Jung frames the market gap in access terms: close to a third of 11- to 16-year-olds receive some form of private tutoring, an advantage priced out of reach for the rest. Angela Chou, an investor at Felix Capital, cited the founders' track record in scaling to hundreds of thousands of students in a short period.
Proceeds will fund UK growth and an international roll-out. Medly has already launched SATs coverage in the United States and plans to add APs and ACTs by the end of the year. Part of the capital goes towards the evidence base — the company has published its first research paper benchmarking its marking against human examiners and completed a randomised controlled trial with more than 1,000 UK students in lower-attaining schools — and towards proprietary models trained for UK and EEA curricula.
The raise follows Medly's selection for the Department for Education's AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme, alongside Pearson and ElevenLabs.
Original source: EU-Startups
