Two 20-year-old college dropouts just pulled off one of 2024's most impressive bootstrapped success stories. Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan's AI notetaker Turbo AI has exploded to 5 million users and eight-figure annual recurring revenue, adding 20,000 new users daily while staying profitable. What started as a Duke University side project to solve their own classroom struggles has become the go-to AI study tool across campuses nationwide.
The numbers hit different when you're barely old enough to drink. Turbo AI co-founders Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan are watching their AI notetaker add 20,000 users daily while generating eight-figure annual recurring revenue - and they're still teenagers. The pair dropped out of Duke and Northwestern this year to chase what's become one of 2024's most compelling bootstrap success stories.
"I would always struggle with taking notes because I just couldn't both listen to the teacher and write at the same time," CEO Dhawan told TechCrunch in a recent interview. That classroom frustration sparked what's now a 5-million-user platform that's redefining how students and professionals consume information.
The growth trajectory reads like startup fiction. What began as "Turbolearn" - a side project to record lectures and auto-generate study materials - spread from their dorm rooms to classmates across Duke and Northwestern. Within months, the app had infiltrated Harvard, MIT, and universities nationwide. The past six months alone saw explosive growth from one million to five million users, according to the founders.
But here's where Turbo AI gets interesting - it's not just another transcription tool. The platform takes the standard record-transcribe-summarize formula and makes it interactive with AI-generated quizzes, flashcards, and a built-in chat assistant that explains complex concepts. Students upload 30-page lectures and spend hours working through 75 quiz questions, Dhawan notes. "You don't do that unless it's really working."
The product evolved as users pushed its boundaries. Large lecture halls created audio issues, so the founders added support for PDFs, YouTube videos, and reading materials. That pivot proved prescient - document uploads now outpace live recordings as the primary use case.
What's more surprising is Turbo AI's reach beyond academia. The company rebranded from "Turbolearn" to reflect its expanding user base, which now includes consultants, lawyers, doctors, and analysts at Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Professionals upload reports and convert them into podcast-style summaries for commute listening, the founders say.
