Fermi.ai: Flipkart Ex-CTO’s Bold Bet on Making Learning Hard (and Smarter) with AI

In a refreshingly contrarian move in the crowded AI-edtech space, Peeyush Ranjan, the former CTO of Flipkart and a veteran of Google’s AI leadership, has launched Fermi.ai—a global platform with a provocative thesis: to use artificial intelligence not to give easy answers, but to make learning meaningfully harder and more effective. Co-founded with serial entrepreneur Mukesh Bansal under their startup studio Meraki Labs, Fermi.ai is taking on high-school STEM education with a product designed to restore the critical, often-avoided element of “productive struggle.”

This launch signals a maturation in the application of AI to education. While many tools focus on content delivery or instant Q&A, Fermi.ai is targeting the core cognitive process of problem-solving itself. It’s a direct challenge to the superficial “answer-getting” culture amplified by generative AI, aiming instead to build durable conceptual mastery.

The Core Innovation: An AI That Tutors, Not Tells

Fermi.ai‘s differentiation lies in its nuanced, step-by-step approach to learning:

• Handwriting-First Digital Canvas: In a world of keyboards and multiple-choice, Fermi prioritizes the stylus and freehand input. This is crucial for STEM, where solving a physics problem or balancing a chemical equation is a spatial, sequential reasoning process. The platform meets students where their thinking happens—on a scratchpad.
• Adaptive, Step-Level Tutoring: Built on a stack of large language models, the AI doesn’t just evaluate a final answer. It tracks each step in a student’s logic, identifies where misconceptions creep in, and provides targeted, Socratic-style prompts to guide them back on track without revealing the solution. This mimics the ideal human tutor’s method.
• The “Productive Struggle” Engine: The platform is explicitly designed to increase friction in the right places. It prevents bypassing deep understanding by making students engage with the process, protecting the intellectual grit that leads to true learning.
• Unprecedented Educator Insights: For teachers, Fermi.ai promises a shift from judging outcomes to understanding thought processes. Analytics can reveal common stumbling blocks in a class, individual student reasoning patterns, and the efficacy of teaching methods, moving beyond simple gradebooks to cognitive maps.

The Founders’ Edge: Scaling Meets Deep AI Expertise

The venture carries the weight of formidable founder-market fit:

• Peeyush Ranjan brings a rare blend of massive-scale engineering leadership (Flipkart) and cutting-edge AI product experience (Google Assistant, Gemini). He understands how to build robust, scalable AI systems and, crucially, how they interact with human behavior.
• Mukesh Bansal brings a proven track record of building and scaling consumer brands (Myntra, Cult.fit) in the Indian market, ensuring the product isn’t just technologically brilliant but also consumer-centric and commercially viable.

Their collaboration through Meraki Labs suggests a deliberate, studio-based approach to venture building, focusing on deep R&D before scaling—a luxury in the often-hyped edtech arena.

The Data-Driven Early Signal

Early pilot results are promising. With a small cohort of 79 students generating over 15,000 concept-tests, the platform demonstrated low abandonment rates (13-15%) and, more importantly, tangible improvement: students starting with proficiency scores around 2/10 were able to elevate their understanding to an average of 6.7 through guided engagement. This is early but critical validation that the “productive struggle” model can retain students and drive measurable progress.

The Contrarian Bet in a Noisy Market

Fermi.ai enters a landscape where many edtech players are racing to integrate generative AI for instant answers and content creation. Ranjan and Bansal are betting on the opposite: that in a world awash with information, the highest value will be placed on tools that cultivate the ability to think, reason, and solve novel problems. They are not automating learning; they are automating the scaffolding that makes deep learning possible.

The Road Ahead: Scaling the Art of Thinking

Currently bootstrapped with a lean team, Fermi.ai‘s plan to raise capital after refining its pricing and GTM strategy is prudent. The challenges are significant: convincing students (and parents) accustomed to quick fixes to embrace a harder path, seamlessly integrating into diverse school curricula, and competing in the massive but crowded Indian ($8B) and US ($5B) edtech markets.

However, the opportunity is monumental. If successful, Fermi.ai could redefine the role of technology in education—from a repository of information to a personalized cognitive gym. It represents the hope that AI, rather than making human intellect obsolete, can be its most powerful trainer.