The Tamesis
PalFish AI tutor Mia.
Parfish
The name of the educational technology startup “PalFish” was chosen ten years ago, which means a small fish swimming freely in the vast ocean of knowledge. Ten years later, PalFish has successfully combined its image with state-of-the-art technology to become an interactive online reading and language service provider with 70 million users worldwide.
“Artificial intelligence is reshaping education, just like the printing press at the time. It breaks the dependence on scarce teaching resources by providing higher-quality, scalable ‘artificial intelligence teachers.'” Xiao Li, vice president of PalFish International, said in a recent interview with Forbes China. He said that this scale has “reshaped the cost structure of the education industry. Competition in the education industry no longer depends on capital scale, but on the understanding of technology, application speed and product iteration capabilities.”
PalFish founder and CEO Henry Huang emphasized speed in remarks at the company’s 10th anniversary conferenceth anniversary celebration earlier this year. “On our fifth anniversary, we came up with the slogan ‘Continuous Evolution’. Today, we’ve elevated it to ‘The speed of evolution is everything,’ setting higher expectations for speed.” said Huang, co-founder of Chinese social media giant ByteDance.
Li said Beijing-based privately held PalFish’s revenue will top $100 million in 2024 and will double this year due to its popularity among children ages 3 to 12. International business (focused on Southeast Asia) accounts for about 20% of the total and is expected to grow 150% this year. Next steps: Li aims to significantly expand PalFish’s connections in the fast-growing Middle Eastern market over the next three years.
PalFish aims to expand its learning centers in the Middle East.
Parfish
PalFish’s expansion in Southeast Asia has benefited from a macroeconomic boost, with trade fueling growth in the region. Since opening its first site in Bangkok in 2023, PalFish has created a total of 14 PalFish centers overseas, including 10 in Thailand and 4 in Vietnam, located in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi and Da Nang. The company plans to open up to five more stores in Southeast Asia by the end of 2025, Li said. PalFish’s activities in this field this year include a speech competition in Bangkok and an 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 Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund.
To help tailor engaging solutions to individual students around the world, PalFish uses an artificial intelligence tutor named “Mia.” Li said Mia is not a “simple chatbot, but a complex system designed to be a ‘super teacher’ that can independently complete the entire course, including knowledge explanation, interactive Q&A, generating personalized exercises based on real-time feedback from students, and sensing emotional states to provide encouragement.”
“In the past, artificial intelligence could only perform interactive questions and answers, but now it can have a deep understanding of children’s thinking and learning, and in some aspects even surpasses human teachers,” he said. “The AI intelligent tutor independently developed by PalFish can achieve one-on-one, full-process teaching and achieve high accuracy through massive data training,” Li said. The AI assistant generates after-school learning reports, allowing the “care team” to provide efficient feedback to parents and learners, “thus improving the efficiency of collaboration between cross-border teams and reducing management inefficiencies caused by cultural differences.”
As a result, Li believes that today’s new era of artificial intelligence is reshaping content and learning methods, and pushing a generation of young users beyond the “digital native” concept of the early Internet.
“Today’s technological revolution has brought education companies back to a new starting line. The key to competition is the speed of evolution. The most profound impact of artificial intelligence on education is to allow children to truly become ‘AI natives’ and learn to cooperate and create with AI from an early age,” Li said. He said that for families and school districts facing budget constraints, artificial intelligence methods can help reduce courseware costs significantly and shift learning from “passive acceptance” to “active creation.”
Xiao Li, Vice President of PalFish International.
Parfish
In addition to children’s language learning applications such as PalFish Class, PalFish English, and PalFish Read, the company also sells hardware such as “Learn Station”, “Brainy Pad” and smart eye protection floor lamps. Li said course packages are usually customized based on user needs, with prices ranging from US$200 to US$5,000 in different Southeast Asian markets.
PalFish has “expanded from English into multi-disciplinary operations” such as mathematics, Li said. Applying technology on a global scale requires education companies to continually update their products and operations to meet varying local needs, he continued. “In this sense, artificial intelligence is not just a tool, but an accelerator, driving education companies to transform globally faster and more effectively,” he said.
PalFish practices what it preaches, using artificial intelligence internally to help manage employees and assist with overseas expansion. “We not only use artificial intelligence to enhance educational services, but also optimize cross-cultural team management,” Li said. “The internal system empowered by artificial intelligence helps supervisors expand their management radius, achieve precise collaboration among global teams, promote organizational flattening, and speed up decision-making.”
Lee also gets behind-the-scenes, practical product advice at home: His family reads PalFish picture books and uses its online one-on-one English tutorials. He said they are a ready source of feedback and help PalFish enhance “timely products or continuously improving services.”
