Binance co-founder-backed YZi Labs has been making significant investments lately, and to add to these investments, YZi Labs has announced that it has led a $11 million initial funding round for VideoTutor, an AI education agent founded by a 20-year-old Silicon Valley-based serial AI entrepreneur.
Details on the investments
Amino Capital, BridgeOne Capital, Baidu Ventures, JinQiu Fund (associated with ByteDance), and others participated in the financing.
This represents YZi Labs’ first investment in AI software since broadening its scope earlier this year, which reflects the company’s larger goal of supporting innovative solutions that enhance human learning through AI.
Over 2 million students in the United States take the SAT every year, yet more than 85% of students lack access to individualised assistance because in-person tutoring costs between $60 and $90 per hour.
By providing an AI tutor that rapidly transforms a straightforward inquiry into a customised, animated, and voice-guided lesson, VideoTutor seeks to bridge that gap.
Its material is accurate and easy to understand, always reasonably priced, accessible around the clock, and geared toward K–12, SAT/ACT, STEM, and language learners.
Details on the company
James Zhan, a former employee of Meta and Google, and Kai Zhao, a 20-year-old college student and serial entrepreneur whose prior AI education venture was supported by YC, launched the business.
Their personal experience of witnessing friends struggle with the exorbitant expense of high-quality coaching gave rise to the concept.
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Within the first ten days of its May 2025 launch, VideoTutor produced over 20,000 films and reached over 20,000 users.
Since then, educational institutions and learning platforms throughout the world have submitted more than 1,000 requests for API integration.
Quotes from the leaders
Most AI video generation companies rely on diffusion-based models and struggle to deal with structured information such as equations and diagrams, says Dr. Jing Xiong, YZi Labs AI Investment Director, ex-Google Gemini, Stanford Ph.D. in Computer Vision.
By contrast, VideoTutor is guaranteed to be semantically correct, fast, visually clear, and cheaper through a combination of a language model with a Manim-based rendering.
A technically superior, stable video-making cycle is enabled by its novel Layout Manager and LLM-based fault-tolerance system.
“We understand the students’ needs because we’ve lived through the same learning and testing journey ourselves,” said Kai Zhao, Founder & CEO of VideoTutor. “We know YZi Labs’ mission is to use AI to democratize access to opportunity.”
“VideoTutor represents the kind of creativity that’s hard to engineer,” said Dr Jing. “The team is young, but they approach problems in ways even experienced ML researchers might not think of. When I mentioned their work – generating videos with text, animated equations, and plots – to a researcher friend at a leading video gen company, he was genuinely surprised and asked, ‘How did they do that?’ That moment stuck with me.”
The money raised from this round will speed up VideoTutor’s research and development, improving its AI animation engine and instructional models to produce videos more quickly and accurately.