London's Medly AI raises $8M Seed led by Felix Capital to bring AI tutoring within reach of students who can't afford the private kind

Medly AI (London) has raised $8 million / €6.9 million in a Seed round led by Felix Capital, with participation from Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures, and angels including Andrey Dobrynin (CEO of InvestEngine), Al Giles (Venture Partner, Creator Fund), Jean Hammond (GP, LearnLaunch Accelerator), and Hector Mason (GP, Episode 1 Ventures). The company was founded in February 2025 by Dr. Paul Jung and Dr. Kavi Samra, two UCL medicine graduates who left NHS careers to build what they argue is the AI tutoring product that the UK's private tutoring market has made necessary but inaccessible for most families.

The product combines seven large language models in a proprietary architecture to deliver conversational, personalised exam preparation across GCSE, IGCSE, A-Level, IB, and SAT syllabuses. The design intent is dialogue rather than question banks: Medly adapts to a student's gaps in real time, explains concepts through back-and-forth exchange, and tracks progress against curriculum requirements. A companion product, Medly Open, serves university students. The company reports 400,000 users in the UK, with 74% of GCSE students on the platform improving by at least one grade — a metric from an independently verified study and a UK Department for Education grant won through the competitive AI Tutoring Tools Pioneers Programme.

The access argument and its commercial logic

Jung's framing is explicitly about structural inequality: "Almost a third of 11–16-year-olds receive some form of private tutoring. For those who can afford it, it's a powerful advantage. For those who can't, it's an equally powerful reinforcer of the status quo." That is a fundraising narrative as much as a mission statement, and it is also a commercial thesis: a tutoring product priced below the private market that demonstrably improves grades at scale is addressing real demand, not manufactured need. Eka Ventures and Ada Ventures — both known for backing companies with access or diversity dimensions alongside the commercial case — fit that framing. What the pitch requires alongside the access story is a retention number: how many of those 400,000 users are active, at what frequency, and what proportion sit exams with Medly as their primary prep tool. That figure is not yet public.

Felix Capital's summer pattern

This is Felix Capital's third lead in ProYarn's coverage since early July: Polysense (food manufacturing quality control AI, July 9) and Intropy (spare parts AI, July 31) preceded it. Three different verticals in six weeks points to a deliberate thesis rather than sector concentration: AI software that automates what trained professionals charge premium rates to do. A quality inspector, a supply-chain specialist, a tutor. The thread through each is the premium placed on the human equivalent and the margin that exists once AI can match or closely approach it.

The Seed funds US entry — SAT preparation first, then AP and ACT by year-end. The transition from UK to US is the difficult part: the product has been built and tuned on UK curricula, and the US market has incumbents that have been operating in the SAT context longer. Medly's evidence base is genuine; whether the tutoring model transfers to an unfamiliar curriculum environment is what the next 18 months will establish.