PalFish AI tutor Mia.
PalFish
Education technology start-up “PalFish” picked its name a decade ago to associate itself with small fish swimming freely in a vast ocean of knowledge. Ten years on, PalFish has become a provider of interactive online reading and language services with 70 million users globally by successfully combining that image with state-of-the-art technology.
“Artificial intelligence is reshaping education just like the printing press did in its time. It breaks the dependence on scarce teaching resources by providing higher-quality, scalable ‘AI teachers,’” PalFish International Vice President Xiao Li said in a recent interview with Forbes China. That scale is already “reshaping the cost structure of the education industry, where competition no longer depends on capital scale but on the understanding of technology, application speed, and product iteration capabilities,” he said.
Speed was highlighted by PalFish’s founder and CEO Henry Huang in remarks at the company’s 10th anniversary celebration earlier this year. “At our fifth anniversary, we introduced the slogan ‘Keep Evolving.’ Today, we elevate it to ‘Evolving Speed Is Everything,’ setting even higher expectations for speed,” said Huang, a co-founder of China social media giant ByteDance.
Revenue at privately held, Beijing-headquartered PalFish topped $100 million in 2024 and will double this year owing to its popularity among three- to 12-year-olds, Li said. International business – with a focus on Southeast Asia – accounts for about 20% of that total and is expected to grow by 150% this year. Next up: Li aims to expand PalFish’s ties in a big way in fast-growing Middle Eastern markets in the next three years.
PalFish aims to expand its learning centers in the Middle East.
PalFish
PalFish’s expansion in Southeast Asia has benefitted from a macroeconomic lift as trade bolsters growth in the region. Since opening its first site in Bangkok in 2023, PalFish has created a total of 14 overseas PalFish Centers, including 10 in Thailand and four in Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang. By the end of 2025, it plans to open as many as five more in Southeast Asia, Li said. Among its activities in the area this year, PalFish organized a Speech Contest in Bangkok and EdTech Forum in Hanoi. PalFish’s rapid growth has helped the company attract funding over the years from top international investors such as GGV Capital and the Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund.
To help tailor attractive solutions for individual students globally, PalFish uses an AI tutor named “Mia.” Mia isn’t a “simple chatbot but (part of) complex systems designed as ‘super teachers’ capable of independently completing a full-process class, including knowledge explanation, interactive Q&A, generating personalized exercises based on students’ real-time feedback, and perceiving emotional states to provide encouragement,” Li said.
“While AI in the past could only conduct interactive Q&A, it can now deeply understand children’s thinking and learning situations, even surpassing human teachers in some aspects,” he said. “PalFish’s self-developed AI intelligent tutors can achieve one-on-one, full-process teaching, and reach a high degree of accuracy through massive data training,” said Li. AI assistants generate after-class learning reports, allowing “care teams” to provide efficient feedback to parents and learners, “thereby improving collaboration efficiency among cross-border teams and reducing management inefficiencies caused by cultural differences.”
As a result, Li believes today’s new era of AI is reshaping content and learning methods, and advancing a generation of young users beyond the early Internet idea of “digital native.”
“Today’s technological revolution has brought education companies back to a new starting line, where the key to competition is evolution speed. The most profound impact of AI on education is enabling children to truly become ‘AI natives,’ learning to collaborate and create with AI from an early age,” Li said. For families and school districts facing budget constraints, AI approaches can help courseware costs drop significantly and learning to shift from “passive acceptance” to “active creation,” he said.
PalFish International Vice President Xiao Li.
PalFish
In addition to children’s language-learning apps such as PalFish Class, PalFish English and PalFish Read, the company generates sales from hardware such as “Learn Station,” “Brainy Pad,” and intelligent eye-protection floor lamps. Course packages are usually customized according to user needs, Li said, with prices ranging from $200 to $5,000 in different Southeast Asian markets.
PalFish is already “expanding from English to multi-disciplinary businesses,” such as math, Li said. Applying technology globally requires education companies to continuously update their products and operations to meet diverse local needs, he continued. “In this sense, AI is not just a tool but an accelerator that drives education companies to transform globally faster and more effectively,” he said.
Practicing what it preaches, PalFish uses AI internally to help manage staff and aid expansion abroad. “We not only use AI to enhance educational services but also to optimize cross-cultural team management,” Li said. “AI-empowered internal systems help supervisors expand their management radius, achieve precise collaboration among global teams, and promote organizational flattening to speed up decision-making.”
Li also gets behind-the-scenes, down-to-earth product advice back at home: his family reads PalFish’s picture books and uses its online one-on-one English tutorials. They are a ready source of feedback, he said, and help PalFish enhance “products or continuously improving service in a timely manner.”