Day: November 10, 2025

• Turbo AI is a notetaking app that’s adding 20,000 new users per day.
• Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, 20-year-old founders, built it to help students.
• “I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time,” Dhawan said.

Rudy Arora and Sarthak Dhawan, now both 20, have been friends since sixth grade.

By high school, they were coding together and building viral apps — including a Christmas light installation app that made $60,000 in revenue, Dhawan told Business Insider.

They’re still in business together, now running Turbo AI, a notetaking app that has grown from 1 million to 5.7 million users in the past six months. The company says the app is adding about 20,000 new users each day and is on track to earn eight-figures in annual recurring revenue.

They couldn’t find an AI tool for students, so they built one.

The idea for Turbo came after the two started college in 2023. Arora was attending Northwestern, and Dhawan was at Duke.

“I had a problem where I could never take notes and pay attention to the teacher at the same time,” Dhawan said. “At the same time, AI was starting to boom.”

Dhawan and Arora decided to build and test a tool that leveraged AI to record lectures and generate notes, flashcards, and quizzes to enhance the learning process.

Don’t mistake Turbo as a shortcut for slackers, however. Dhawan and Arora both have serious academic credentials. Dhawan was the salutatorian of his high school, took 21 AP classes, and earned a perfect score on the ACT, while Arora took 16 AP courses and earned a 1560 on the SAT, which they’ve noted on their LinkedIn profiles.

They’re channeling their own experience as top students to develop Turbo’s internal benchmarking system, which tests different combinations of inputs and outputs to pinpoint the information that matters most.

AI notetaking apps have become a hot category in Silicon Valley over the past year. Granola, an AI notetaking app that launched in 2024, announced a $43 million Series B round in May. Read AI, an AI assistant founded in 2021 that creates AI-generated summaries, transcriptions, and video highlights of meetings, announced a $50 million Series B funding round in October 2024. Even established players in the productivity market like Zoom and Notion have launched AI notetaking tools.

When Dhawan and Arora first launched Turbo last year, they said there wasn’t much competition.

“There was actually nothing for students on the market,” he said. “That’s also part of a reason for our success — we’ve been doing it for longer than the other competitors.”

Their launch was scrappy. They made rounds on their respective campuses, gave out cookies, and put up posters inside bathroom stalls, Arora said. Then they took to social media. “I posted like 40, 50 TikToks, and then the 40th or 50th one went mega viral. It got like 20 million views,” Arora said.

They now have users at colleges across the country, including Harvard and MIT. They said they even have customers at Goldman Sachs and a few employees at McKinsey. They’ve both now dropped out of college and have a full-time team of 15 people.

The company makes money through subscriptions — $20 a month or $120 a year — and has been bootstrapped since launch. It raised a little over $750,000 from inbound investor interest. The founders said they have no plans to seek additional funding since it’s already operating profitably.

Quality is key in the AI age

Dhawan and Arora say quality is their top priority.

“What AI has done is it’s taken the barrier to entry to building software and it’s decreased it,” Dhawan said. “Now, because consumers expect more, and AI has enabled us to ship features faster, the emphasis is all on quality, retention, usage, stickiness.”

The pair has redesigned their quiz question feature, for instance, three or four times, Dhawan said. While it wasn’t initially their top focus, it’s now their most used tool, he added.

Another big insight they’ve learned: Presentation is crucial. “No one wants to look at something that’s not pretty, and especially students, there’s a whole trend of people spending hours and hours on their iPad making notes pretty,” Dhawan said.

They’ve seen that many users turn to Turbo just to transform “PDFs that look kind of ugly” into a more readable, aesthetically pleasing format, he said.

As they look ahead, their mandate is simple: “We’re trying to show that AI can be used positively,” Dhawan said. “It’s a very powerful tool for actually enhancing the speed at which you learn.”

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tori Dunlap, the 31-year-old founder and CEO of Her First $100K, a financial education company geared toward Gen Z and millennial women. She’s also an author and podcast host based in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

I founded Her First $100K when I was 25 to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money.

I didn’t build a business to work so hard that I burn myself out. That’s why I left a 9-to-5 job. I built a company culture where we do really important work, but we say all the time, “We’re not curing cancer.”

We have six full-time employees, we’re about to hire two more, and we have another nine contractors. We’re a team of all women.

If you’re a menstruating founder, you lose at least five days a month to feeling gross, plus another few days during the luteal phase, during which I feel like an insane person. Men don’t have to deal with these things.

That’s one of the reasons we have menstruation leave at Her First $100K. We also have quarterly weeks off for our employees during which they’re paid, but the entire company pauses.

Here’s what a workday in my life is like.

My day usually begins around 7:30 a.m.

I’m not up at 5 a.m. drinking my lemon water because I like my sleep. I’m not a coffee drinker, so if I don’t get at least eight hours of sleep, I’m a little grumpy.

If I have to be up early for a flight, a podcast, or a press interview, that’s going to impact my wakeup time, but if I have control of my schedule that day, I’m usually up about 7:30 a.m.

As soon as I get out of bed, I check my phone. I know I shouldn’t be doing so, and I don’t love that I do, but I do. I check emails and Slack, our social content’s performance, and my texts from friends.

Then I do what my friend Liz Moody talks about as a “circ walk” — a circadian walk. The idea is that if you can get sunlight in your eyes as soon as possible after waking up, your digestion improves, you feel more awake throughout the day, and your metabolism’s better. Honestly, it just makes me feel really good.

I live close to the water, so I walk to the beach. Sometimes, the walk is only 10 minutes. Other times, it’s a half hour.

I usually eat the same thing for breakfast every day; I split a protein smoothie with my partner. It’s a berry chocolate smoothie, and I’ve been drinking a version of that since 2016. He usually makes that while I’m doing chores around the house or preparing for calls.

I usually start work around 9 a.m.

I always find mornings to be most productive for me. I might have meetings with my team, be getting on a flight to speak somewhere, or just be answering emails.

Thursdays typically are our recording days. I record my own podcast, and then I may go on someone else’s show.

My company is fully remote. Those of us who live in Seattle try to see each other and work together once or twice a month. It’s nice to gather in person, but since we have people all over, we also offer virtual coworking on Zoom. That’s one way we keep up our company culture, even though we’re remote.

Lunch is a nice break for me

I usually cook lunch myself, or I have leftovers from the night before. Sometimes my COO comes over to cowork with me, and we might order lunch.

I really try not to eat while working. It’s a nice break, and I try to take at least half an hour.

I’ll usually watch a TV show, such as on Food Network or the Try Guys. I dream of being a guest judge on the Food Network, so I’m studying up. I’ve worked with the Try Guys before; I politely bullied them until they let me in, which is how I’ve gotten every opportunity in my business — just politely asking until they say yes.

I do things around the house during breaks

In the afternoons, I sometimes have more meetings and interviews. I also try to sneak in my actual work in between those — creating content, being the public face of the company, working on my next book proposal, and CEO work of big vision planning, thinking about our strategy, and testing certain things.

If I have breaks between tasks, I usually try to get something done around the house. I’ll throw in a load of laundry or tidy up. I have a house cleaning service come twice a month, and honestly, I’ll probably move to once a week because it’s really nice and frees up my time.

Taking time during the workday is something that we’ve built into our work and fully approve of and support through our company policies. People have lives outside work. Our full-time employees already have unlimited PTO, but if someone needs to take the afternoon or a half hour off, they can do so without needing approval.

My workday typically ends around 5 p.m.

If it’s a standard day, I’m off at 5 p.m. and I won’t touch my laptop again. If I get an idea or a spark, I’ll sometimes open my laptop after dinner or at 10 p.m., because I genuinely enjoy working on my business, but I don’t expect this of any of my other team members.

After work, I’ll typically either cook dinner, meet friends, or go out for date night. If I’m having dinner at home with my partner, we usually split a salad kit and add chicken. It’s a go-to option — it’s healthy and quick.

Usually, after dinner — and I’ll sometimes do it in the morning, too — I do barre. It’s my workout of choice, and I try to do it three times a week.

I used to think that working out was about getting as skinny as possible. One of the things I love about barre is that you show up, make modifications, do the exercises that are right for you, and get as strong as you can. It really positively affected my relationship with fitness and with my body, and I think it has 100% affected the way I show up as a business owner.

I read and journal before bed

My partner and I might watch an episode or two of our show — right now, we’re watching Money Heist — or do some reading. I’m a big reader, and so is he. When I don’t read, I don’t feel as good. Currently, I’m reading “Wild Dark Shore,” a novel. I track every book that I read.

I read a variety of genres, including fairy smut fantasy, murder mystery thrillers, and general literary fiction. I read very little nonfiction because my entire life is a nonfiction book, and books are my escape.

I try to journal every single night, and I’ve done so almost every night for the last five or six years. The journal has been a huge part of helping me become the best person I can be and process my thoughts.

I try to be in bed with the lights out at 10:30 p.m., but usually that ends up being 11.