Beyond Chatbots: Akshay Singh on Building Better Technology for the Next Billion Learners
In less than four months, Akshay Singh and his team at Flylane took Curio, an intelligent tutoring platform, from zero to 30,000 users. The product gained adoption across multiple universities, while an accompanying brand Instagram channel reached millions of people organically.
But Curio was designed to do something unusual for a tutoring product powered by increasingly capable language models: it deliberately refused to give students the answers.
Instead, it encouraged them to think.
Built around the Socratic method, Curio focused on explanations, guided questioning and helping students arrive at answers through their own understanding.
For Akshay Singh, the 22-year-old London-based entrepreneur involved in building the platform, that distinction reflected a belief he had developed over years of experimenting with education technology: making information easier to access is valuable, but helping someone genuinely learn is a much more interesting challenge.
And despite growing doubts among some investors and entrepreneurs about education as an attractive technology market, Akshay Singh believes the sector needs more innovators willing to rethink how learning works.
Why Curio Was Designed Not to Give Students Answers
The rapid popularity of conversational technology has changed how students access information.
A student can now ask almost any question and receive a detailed response within seconds. But the availability of answers does not necessarily translate into understanding.
That was one of the central challenges the Flylane team wanted Curio to address.
Rather than becoming another tool students could use to complete assignments without engaging with the material, Curio was built around the Socratic method, an approach to learning that encourages understanding through questions, dialogue and reasoning.
The tutor was designed to guide students towards answers, break down difficult concepts and offer explanations without simply completing the work for them.
This approach also aimed to discourage academic dishonesty by making learning, rather than answer generation, the central experience.
For Akshay Singh, a good tutor should not simply know the answer. It should understand how to help a student discover it.
That philosophy shaped Curio’s design, from the way it responded to questions to the learning experiences it sought to create.
From Zero to 30,000 Users
Curio grew to 30,000 users in less than four months, gaining adoption across multiple universities.
Alongside the product, the team developed an organic Instagram channel that reached millions of people through educational content.
The experience demonstrated the potential of combining strong product design, thoughtful distribution and an understanding of how students interact with learning technology.
But rapid growth also prompted a broader question.
Even a successful tutoring platform could address only part of the education experience. Learning does not happen in isolation from teachers, institutions, families, curricula and the systems that support students.
The team began considering how the technology behind Curio could benefit people beyond the platform’s original audience.
Flylane is now preparing to open-source Curio, allowing developers, educators and institutions to adapt and build upon the technology for their own educational environments.
For Akshay Singh, the decision reflects a belief that the value of educational technology should not be measured solely by subscriptions, user growth or commercial outcomes.
Making the underlying technology more accessible could allow a wider community to experiment with better learning experiences without having to build everything from scratch.
An Interest in Education That Started Long Before Curio
Akshay Singh’s involvement in education technology began well before his work at Flylane.
Having started building websites at eleven and sold his first digital agency at fifteen, he continued experimenting with products and applications across different industries.
Education remained a recurring interest.
He became an early advocate of homeschooling and alternative approaches to education, questioning whether conventional classrooms and standardised learning pathways were always the best fit for every student.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he built a university finder application designed to help prospective students navigate their educational options at a time when uncertainty was affecting traditional pathways. Whilst helping students get into universities by offering free assistance on Twitter with essays, advice and knowledge on this area.
His interest in learning tools continued into 2023, when he built-in-public and sold a flashcards application during Buildspace Nights and Weekends, a builder community supported by Andreessen Horowitz and YC.
Inspired by established spaced-repetition tools such as Anki, the application explored what a more modern, intelligent and intuitive flashcard experience could look like.
The product brought together familiar principles of active recall and spaced repetition with newer capabilities intended to make studying more personalised.
Some of those ideas would later become core features of Curio, connecting Akshay’s independent experiments with his subsequent work on a much larger educational product.
For Akshay Singh, these projects reflected a longstanding interest in how people learn independently, how technology can adapt to different learners and why useful educational experiences should not be limited to formal classrooms.
Education Needs More Innovators, Not Fewer
Education has often been viewed as a difficult market for technology companies.
Institutions can have complex purchasing processes, tight budgets and established systems that are difficult to change. Products may need to meet different curriculum requirements, demonstrate measurable outcomes and gain the trust of educators, students and parents.
These challenges have contributed to scepticism about whether education can produce the same commercial outcomes as other technology sectors.
Akshay Singh sees the difficulty as a reason for more thoughtful innovation rather than a reason to avoid the sector.
Education influences almost every other industry. Advances in healthcare, science, engineering and entrepreneurship all depend, in part, on people’s ability to develop knowledge and skills.
Yet access to high-quality learning remains unequal.
Students in different countries, schools and financial circumstances often receive dramatically different levels of individual support.
For Akshay Singh, improving education is not simply a question of building more commercially successful learning applications.
It is about making knowledge, support and opportunity available to people who have historically been excluded by geography, cost or circumstance.
The market may be complicated, but the importance of solving its problems is difficult to overstate.
Chatbots Made Intelligence Accessible. What Comes Next Will Look Different.
The emergence of conversational interfaces has made powerful technology accessible to an unprecedented number of people.
For the first time, users can interact with sophisticated systems using ordinary language rather than technical commands or specialised tools.
Akshay Singh sees this as an important beginning, but not necessarily the ideal interface for every task.
Learning, in particular, requires more than conversation.
Students need opportunities to practise, receive feedback, revisit concepts, test their knowledge and develop understanding over time.
A conversational interface can support those activities, but a meaningful learning experience may also require structured lessons, interactive exercises, adaptive assessments and tools designed around specific educational objectives.
Curio’s emphasis on guided questioning and explanations reflects this distinction.
Rather than treating a general-purpose chatbot as a complete learning experience, the team focused on creating a product designed around the principles of effective tutoring.
Akshay Singh believes the next generation of educational technology will increasingly move towards systems purpose-built for particular subjects, learning environments and educational challenges.
That could include specialised models designed for education, capable of supporting curriculum requirements, recognising learning gaps and adapting their behaviour to different pedagogical approaches.
The opportunity is not simply to make general-purpose technology available inside classrooms. It is to develop technology that understands the particular demands of teaching and learning.
Why Design Matters More Than Ever
Akshay Singh’s background in design has played a significant role in how he approaches educational products.
For him, design is not simply about how a platform looks. It is about understanding how people think, behave and make decisions.
In education, that requires particular care.
A product might be technically capable of generating excellent explanations but still fail if students find it confusing, intimidating or difficult to use.
Similarly, a tool may offer dozens of features without helping someone learn more effectively.
Akshay Singh sees thoughtful design as an increasingly important competitive advantage as advanced technical capabilities become more widely available.
When different products can access similar underlying technology, the experience built around it becomes more important.
For educational products, that means understanding student motivation, reducing unnecessary friction and making the learning process engaging without compromising educational quality.
The most useful technology is not necessarily the most complicated.
It is the technology that understands its users well enough to make a difficult task feel manageable.
Making Education More Affordable Means Rethinking How It Works
For Akshay Singh, the opportunity extends beyond improving individual learning products.
Educational institutions devote substantial resources to administration, reporting, coordination, technology systems and the operational work required to deliver education.
While many of these functions are essential, they can also consume resources that might otherwise support teaching, student services and learning.
He believes advances in intelligent systems could help institutions simplify repetitive processes, improve access to information and reduce the cost of operating complex educational environments.
The objective should not simply be reducing institutional expenditure.
It should be allowing a greater proportion of available resources to reach the people education is intended to serve.
At the same time, products such as Curio demonstrate how personalised learning support could become less expensive to deliver at scale.
Together, improvements in learning technology and institutional operations could change the economics of education.
Instead of concentrating resources on maintaining complicated processes, institutions may be able to direct more attention and investment towards better teaching, stronger student support and more personalised learning experiences.
For Akshay, that is where technology has the potential to deliver lasting value.
Technology Should Amplify Human Potential
Akshay’s broader interest in technology has consistently centred on making capabilities more accessible.
Through his involvement with NoCode Weekend, he helped create opportunities for more than 3,000 participants to experiment with building products without conventional programming skills.
His independent applications and work alongside early-stage founders have similarly focused on helping people turn ideas into reality with limited resources.
He sees the next generation of intelligent technology as a continuation of that shift.
By reducing the effort required for repetitive tasks, it could give people more time to focus on creativity, exploration, judgment and solving problems.
For students, that may mean more opportunities to learn independently. For teachers, it could mean more time spent supporting individual learners. For entrepreneurs, it may reduce the cost and complexity of developing ideas.
Akshay Singh believes the greatest opportunity lies not in removing people from these activities, but in expanding what they are capable of achieving.
Technology should be a force multiplier for human creativity and ambition, allowing more people to pursue work that previously required resources or expertise beyond their reach.
The Next Billion Learners
For Akshay Singh, education remains one of the most important places to apply these ideas.
His work on university discovery tools, independent learning applications and Curio reflects an interest in the same underlying question: how can learning become more effective, affordable and accessible?
Open-sourcing Curio represents another step towards making sophisticated learning experiences available beyond the reach of a single product.
But the larger ambition is not limited to tutoring.
It is about rethinking how educational technology is designed, how institutions use their resources and how learners receive support.
That will require better products, more thoughtful design, specialised technology and more entrepreneurs willing to work on the difficult problems education presents.
Akshay Singh believes the sector’s challenges should inspire greater ambition, not discourage innovation.
Because education is not merely another market. It is one of the foundations on which progress in every other industry depends.
The next billion learners will not be reached by making education more complicated or expensive. They will be reached by making intelligence more accessible, learning more personal and ensuring that more of every pound spent on education actually reaches the learner.
