Daria Solovieva
Ivan Crewkov’s entrepreneurial spirit was forged in the chaos of post-Soviet Russia, where the collapse of communism unleashed a wave of unbridled capitalism across the country.
Growing up in this environment, the young Crewkov was inspired by the sudden opportunities that arose, with street vendors and small businesses popping up seemingly overnight.
After studying engineering in university, Crewkov’s path veered towards marketing and entrepreneurship. He launched his first startup, an Eventbrite-style events ticketing platform, while still a student at the university. Though the venture ultimately fizzled, it provided valuable lessons and cemented his long-running partnership with current Buddy.ai co-founder Dima Plotnikov – it was their first venture together.
Crewkov’s ambitions would later take him to the Bay Area, where he joined the team at Cubic.ai,a smart speaker startup, along with Dimitry. This startup would be later acquired by Yandex, a Russian technology giant, after both founders have left the company to launch Buddy.ai.
Their experience at Cubic.ai and struggles of Crewkov’s own children learning English in a Russian-speaking environment ultimately inspired Crewkov’s passion for creating an AI-powered platform tailored specifically for kids.
That platform would become Buddy AI, a company that six years later has over 20 million annual users and over 20 million downloads. Crewkov’s company has also secured significant financial backing, with a recent $11 million seed round led by BITKRAFT Ventures, with participation from One Way Ventures, J Ventures and Point72 Ventures, as TechCrunch reported last month. They’ve raised a total of $13 million to date.
Crewkov’s journey, however, has been anything but smooth – and his experiences offer several key lessons for entrepreneurs .
- Stay Focused, Don’t Chase Trends
Crewkov and his co-founder made a conscious decision to focus on building a defensible, market-defining product rather than compete with general-purpose AI assistants. This allowed them to spend years building a proprietary language model before the so-called “AI revolution” and remain focused on building a language learning platform for kids, a strategy that has allowed Buddy AI to weather the ups and downs of the startup world.
“There are founders who chase trends (crypto/web3, and now AI) and those who focus on doing what they believe is right, allowing the trends to find them from time to time,” says Sergey Toporov, a partner at LETA Capital, which is an investor in Buddy.ai. “Ivan, in my opinion, is definitely the second type.”
- Leverage Your Personal Experiences
Crewkov’s inspiration for Buddy AI came directly from the struggles of his own children learning English as a second language. This deep, personal understanding of the problem has been a key driver of the company’s success, allowing the team to build a truly user-centric product.
“Our kids are our teachers in this case,” Crewkov says. “We would never do anything that would hurt our children. They are our North Star and our first users and testers.”
- Embrace Technical Complexity
Building an AI tutor for children is a difficult technical challenge, requiring Crewkov’s team to develop proprietary speech recognition and language models from scratch. But rather than viewing this as a hindrance, he has come to see it as a critical advantage.
“It almost killed us multiple times,” Crewkov admits. “But now we have such a barrier, such a deep moat around us, that we feel very confident.”
- Choose Investors Wisely
Crewkov’s partnership with BITKRAFT Ventures, a prominent investment firm, has been a game-changer for Buddy AI. Not only did it help the company secure funding, but it also opened up a “whole new universe” of gaming and Hollywood investors who have proven invaluable in shaping the product’s storytelling and marketing.
“They really opened us a door into this brave new world,” Crewkov says. “They’re great experts in marketing, great experts in storytelling education – and that’s been really helpful in building a product that has a significant media component.”
Still, Buddy AI faces plenty of challenges, including navigating a complex regulatory environment for edtech products, continuing to develop its language model and elevating gamification and design elements in an ethical way–while fending off competition from well-funded players in the language learning space.
As Buddy AI continues to grow, Crewkov remains laser-focused on his mission to create the definitive AI-powered language tutor for kids. After all, they’ve been at it for years.
“Buddy is not a newcomer in this space,” Toporov notes. “Years in the market have helped them gain unique experience and data to tackle the speech recognition problem for kids—a challenge that generic speech-to-text solutions don’t adequately address.”
Add comment