Squirrel Ai runs an adaptive learning system that personalizes K-12 instruction for more than 24 million students across over 3,000 physical learning centers worldwide, the company told the World Economic Forum at the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in June 2024.
Founder Derek Haoyang Li, speaking with the Forum, framed the system's purpose plainly: "We use an AI algorithm to imitate the best teacher in the world. Like Da Vinci plus Einstein together, to give every student in this world equal education, to have personal tutoring." That quote captures the deployment's ambition: replace one-size-fits-all instruction with a personalized tutor that adapts in real time.
Squirrel Ai's flagship technology is the Large Adaptive Model (LAM), launched in January 2024. According to the company's product page, LAM combines adaptive AI with education-specific multimodal models and is trained on data from 24 million students and 10 billion learning behaviors. Production deployments report question accuracy rising from 78% to 93% after LAM adoption. The Intelligent Adaptive Learning System (IALS) underneath breaks each subject into nano-level knowledge points, refining hundreds of original concepts into tens of thousands of smaller, more precise ones, then routes each student to the smallest gap in their understanding rather than re-teaching what they already know.
The system runs on proprietary smart-learning tablets deployed in Squirrel Ai's branded centers, where award-winning teachers deliver short mini-lessons that pair with the AI's adaptive practice. Each student completes a diagnostic on entry, receives a personalized roadmap, and is re-tested continuously. The WEF story documents a real deployment case: students in a school that had been struggling to make progress in maths and literacy were tested with Squirrel Ai's adaptive learning system, which then created personalized lessons using the most suitable learning materials for each child.
At full scale, Squirrel Ai operates 3,000+ learning centers globally, with the company actively expanding into California and New York for PreK-5 mathematics. Plans filed in 2025 target a 2026 IPO on a major exchange, and the company has begun franchise sales in the United States and select international markets.
Looking ahead, Squirrel Ai plans to extend its PreK-5 mathematics offering to additional grades and subjects in the US, scale its LAM multimodal capabilities for English and science instruction, and continue building its center footprint through franchising.