We built the tutor our own
students kept asking for
Santi Tutor started inside Santi Open University Ltd. as a tool for distance learners with nobody to ask at 1am. It worked well enough that we opened it up.
Santi's distance learners had lecture recordings, PDFs and a forum that answered in about two days. What they didn't have was someone to ask at the exact moment they got stuck. For anybody working a job around their studies, that is rarely during office hours.
The first prototype was a chat window. It answered questions correctly and taught almost nothing. Students would read a perfect paragraph about integration by parts and still not be able to do it, because the thing they were missing was never a sentence. It was a picture nobody had drawn for them.
So we threw the chat window away and built a board. The tutor writes the statement, sketches the diagram, labels one side, pauses, labels the next, and it narrates what it's doing as it does it. That change is the entire product.
What we're actually trying to fix
A private tutor costs more per hour in Lagos than most families can spend in a month. That's the gap: not a shortage of information, but a shortage of someone patient enough to explain the same step a third time. An AI tutor is worth building only if it's cheap enough that the students who need it most can actually have it, which is why a month costs less than a single human tutoring session.
2,000+
Learners on the waitlist
Any
Subject, course or topic
24/7
Tutor availability
< 3s
To the first stroke on the board
Principles
Four things we won't trade away
- 01
Show the working
An answer without a method teaches nothing. Every lesson exposes its reasoning, including where it's unsure.
- 02
Visual before verbal
Most hard ideas are hard because they were only ever described. We draw them first.
- 03
Cheap enough to actually use
A month of tutoring should cost less than a single hour with a human tutor, or it changes nothing.
- 04
The student owns the lesson
Your boards, notes and history are yours: exportable, deletable, never sold.
Timeline
How we got here
- 1
2024
The 1am problem
Santi's distance learners had nobody to ask outside class hours. We prototyped a tutor that could draw.
- 2
2025
The board works
First version of the live blackboard, tested with 40 students across maths and physics.
- 3
2026
Opening up
Voice tutoring, saved lessons and practice sets ship. The waitlist opens to learners everywhere.
- 4
Next
Every subject, every language
More exam boards, native mobile apps, and tutoring in Nigerian languages.
Who's behind it
A university, teachers, and engineers
Santi Tutor isn't a lab experiment. It's built inside an institution that has to answer to its own students.
- SO
Santi Open University
Founding institution
Santi Tutor started as an internal tool for Santi's own distance learners, who kept asking for a tutor at 1am.
- LT
The learning team
Curriculum & pedagogy
Practising teachers and examiners who design how each subject gets taught on the board.
- ET
The engineering team
Product & infrastructure
The people building the board, the voice stack and the tooling behind every lesson.
Come and break it
We'd rather hear what doesn't work now than after launch. Join the waitlist, or write to us directly.