Yanni Kouloumbis and Nour Gajial stand next to each other and smile for a photo.

MathGPT founders Yanni Kouloumbis ’26 (left) and Nour Gajial ’26.

Two Undergrads Are Using AI to Help Students Learn Calc and More

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The Class of ’26 computer science majors are currently on leave to continue building their successful startup, MathGPT

By Melissa Newcomb

During a hackathon on the Hill their sophomore year, Nour Gajial ’26 and Yanni Kouloumbis ’26 got a notification they’d never seen before: someone had paid to use the website they’d created just a few months earlier.

“I vividly remember that first subscription, running to Nour, and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, somebody just bought MathGPT Unlimited,’” Kouloumbis says. “Then it continued to snowball, so we kept working on it.”

Their startup is an AI-powered app and website that allows users to upload math problems—in algebra, calculus, statistics, geometry, and more. But rather than just providing the solution, it offers step-by-step explanations and responds to follow-up questions. Users can even upload photos of their worksheets, to which the model can respond.

A display of the home page of MathGPT that reads "MathGPT - Your Personal Math Solver. Get instant homework help from your on-demand AI-math solver." There is a box to type your question and tabs for the different subjects including MathGPT, PhysicsGPT, AccountingGPT, and ChemGPT.
The website is simple and straightforward.

MathGPT can also create customized explanatory videos and practice tests, and offers an “AP exam hub” for high schoolers.

“We want to leverage the latest technology to help students get a customized learning experience,” Gajial says. “Many students can’t afford a private tutor. So when they’re struggling, they can come to MathGPT.”

Many students can’t afford a private tutor. So when they’re struggling, they can come to MathGPT.

Nour Gajial ’26

So far, the founders say, the site and app have been accessed by about 15 million students and have some 500,000 monthly users. They've also expanded to other subjects such as physics, chemistry, accounting, computer science, and economics.

The platform’s growth has been swift. By the end of Gajial and Kouloumbis’s sophomore year—just nine months after launching MathGPT—they had 200,000 users and were bringing in $50,000 a month in revenue.

Nour Gajial and Yanni Kouloumbis sit at a table at Cornell together wearing sweatshirts and work on MathGPT on their laptops.
The pair on campus.

Both computer science majors in the Duffield and Bowers colleges, they’d met during their first few weeks as freshmen, when Gajial decided to join Kouloumbis at a hackathon.

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The duo won the competition and went on to compete in 11 more—traveling to Stanford, Penn, and Berkeley to build apps and websites while gaining command of AI models.

They decided to put that experience toward solving a familiar problem for students everywhere—feeling stumped by a challenging assignment—by building the first version of MathGPT.

A display from the MathGPT website of the answer that it gives when asking "Explain what PEMDAS is." MathGPT responds with, "PEMDAS is a rulebook that tells us the order to solve parts of a math problem so that everyone gets the exact same correct answer. Think of it like following a recipe: If you bake a cake in the wrong order it won't turn out right!" It then explains the different steps in order.
A sample of how MathGPT teaches a common concept.

“The majority of our users are high school and college students, but we also have a lot of other use cases,” says Kouloumbis. “We hear from a lot of parents who don’t remember the subjects their kids are studying, so they use MathGPT to get up to speed so they can help.”

Other happy customers include a 64-year-old woman who’d re-enrolled in the final class she needed to complete an engineering degree she’d started years earlier; she praised MathGPT, Kouloumbis recalls, as a space where she could “ask a million questions” without judgment.

We hear from a lot of parents who don’t remember the subjects their kids are studying, so they use MathGPT to get up to speed so they can help.

Yanni Kouloumbis ’26

As the platform grew, the duo found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of the business with their coursework, so they each opted to take a leave of absence to focus on the company.

They now live in San Francisco, where they have 15 employees. Gajial has taken on the CEO role, focusing on issues like growth and distribution, while Kouloumbis leads the engineering team as CTO.

Nour Gajial and Yanni Kouloumbis outdoors on campus behind a table marketing MathGPT with a box of donuts.
The founders at a Stanford career fair.

Social media has played a major role in attracting new users, they say. MathGPT operates an influencer program, with more than 150 content creators who post on TikTok and Instagram about how they benefit from the platform.

“Before the calculator came out, everything was solved by hand; then there was a tool that could compute things faster and more accurately,” Gajial observes. “In that same vein, we want MathGPT to be the AI tool that helps students learn faster and more efficiently.”

Top: Cofounders Kouloumbis (left) and Gajial. (All images provided.)

Published August 27, 2026


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