Lumi

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Inspiration

We built Lumi because studying for exams still feels surprisingly outdated. Students spend hours jumping between textbooks, YouTube videos, ChatGPT, mark schemes and revision websites, often without actually knowing whether they understand something.

We wanted to build something that felt less like a search engine and more like having an incredibly patient tutor sitting next to you.

The idea was simple: what if you could just talk to your AI tutor, ask it anything, draw on a shared whiteboard, upload your notes, and have it actually teach you?

We also wanted to make studying feel less like a chore and more like something students would genuinely choose to do.

What it does

Lumi is an AI tutor designed around conversation.

Students can talk to Lumi using voice, ask questions naturally, work through problems together on an interactive whiteboard, upload PDFs and notes, and get explanations, diagrams and examples tailored to what they are struggling with.

Rather than simply giving students an answer, Lumi is designed to teach the student how to get there.

We initially focused on A-level students in the UK, where we could directly understand the problems our users were facing.

How we built it

We built Lumi as a rapid five-day sprint.

We used modern AI models and web technologies to create a conversational tutoring experience with voice interaction, an interactive whiteboard, document uploads and AI-generated educational content.

A huge part of the build was actually talking to students, getting feedback, watching people use the product and then rapidly changing things based on what we saw.

By the end of the sprint, we had a working product, a real domain, users signing up and students actively completing lessons on the platform.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was trying to build something that felt genuinely useful rather than just putting a chatbot inside an education website.

We had to think carefully about latency, inference costs, voice interaction, the tutoring experience and how to make AI explanations feel natural.

We also had to make a lot of decisions very quickly. With only five days, there was no time to build everything we imagined, so we constantly had to ask: what is the smallest version of this that could actually delight a student?

Getting students to actually use the product was another challenge. Building software is one thing; getting someone to trust it with their education is completely different.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In just five days, we went from an idea to a functioning AI tutoring platform.

We launched Lumi publicly, created a real product and domain, got 50+ signups, had 26+ students complete lessons, and processed over four hours of lesson time shortly after launch.

We also launched on Product Hunt and collected feedback directly from students.

What we're most proud of isn't any individual feature — it's that real students actually chose to sit down and learn with something we built.

What we learned

Our biggest lesson was that building is only half the job.

We initially thought having impressive technology would be enough. It wasn't. Students care about whether the product actually helps them understand something, whether it feels enjoyable to use, and whether they would come back tomorrow.

We also learned how much faster you can move when you launch early and let real users tell you what matters.

Most importantly, we learned that AI tutoring has the potential to be much more than a smarter revision website. The really interesting opportunity is creating an educational relationship that becomes increasingly personalised over time.

What's next for Lumi

We're going to keep building around the thing that matters most: making students better at learning.

Our next steps are to improve Lumi's tutoring quality, expand beyond our initial A-level focus, make the experience even more conversational and personalised, and get Lumi into the hands of substantially more students.

Long term, we want Lumi to become something students can rely on throughout their education — an AI tutor that understands how they learn, remembers their progress and helps them become genuinely better students.

Built With

• ai
• b2b
• b2c
• consumer
• edtech
• saas