Squirrel Ai's Adaptive Learning Platform Reaches 43 Million Cumulative Students Through Tablets and 3,000 Learning Centers

Squirrel Ai, a Chinese adaptive learning platform co-founded by Derek Haoyang Li, has enrolled a cumulative total of more than 43 million students in China and worldwide, Newsweek reported in May 2026. The system is designed to teach students exactly what they need at their own pace. "The new way of learning can make the learning speed like 10 times faster than before," Li told Newsweek at the company's office in Shanghai. The technology monitors students closely to give each one what they need, whether videos or cartoons. When a student struggles, the system serves material from a grade or more below until the concept is understood, and because it knows how long the average student takes to answer a given question, it can detect when a student appears to be losing concentration and adapt. "We can evaluate learning by hour and by even 10 minutes," Li said. The learning materials were developed by teachers to fit specific curricula, and Squirrel Ai uses its own AI model rather than a general-purpose large language model such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which Li sees as more prone to mistakes. At one of the company's 3,000 learning centers, in a Hangzhou shopping mall next to a public school, teenagers work with tablets after regular classes, with a single adult on hand for technical or other problems. An 18-year-old student said the system follows up on her mistakes with related videos until she grasps each point. Li said the Chinese government supports the technology, particularly for bringing students in remote regions up to speed. Squirrel Ai plans to open its first U.S. learning center in summer 2026. Li said its U.S. company was set up completely separately from the Chinese one, with a U.S. hedge fund as the largest shareholder, and that data would not move from the U.S. to China.