Pensive, an AI-assisted grading and personalized learning platform for higher education, has raised $6.8 million (approximately 9.68 billion KRW) in seed funding, the company announced. The round was led by Mayfield, with participation from Reach Capital, Anti Fund, a Sequoia Capital scout fund, an a16z scout fund, Bass Ventures, Vela Partners, Vlad Tenev (co-founder and CEO of Robinhood), Karim Atiyeh (co-founder and CTO of Ramp), the founders of Gradescope, and others.

The company is also opening its platform to all instructors, following a closed beta period during which more than 1,000 instructors and over 100 institutions used Pensive to grade more than 3 million questions.

The idea for Pensive grew out of a firsthand experience with the gap between large-scale university instruction and meaningful, individualized learning. The founder began as a student in a 2,000-person lecture course — so large it was held in the biggest auditorium on campus. Later, as a tutor for the same course, the experience was entirely different: small group sessions where tracking each student’s thinking made it possible to catch misconceptions early, ask the right follow-up questions, and give students space to arrive at understanding on their own.

“Those moments were only possible because the group was small enough that I could track each student’s thinking,” the company wrote in its founding story. “But most students never get that experience.”

Pensive was built on the belief that personalized learning can finally be delivered at scale — but the founders are careful to distinguish their approach from simply providing fast answers. As generative AI makes it increasingly easy for students to bypass the thinking process altogether, Pensive aims to protect what the name itself implies: the habit of reflecting, questioning, and working through problems before reaching conclusions.

The platform’s immediate focus is on giving instructors their time back. As class sizes grow and budgets tighten, faculty are increasingly burdened with grading at the expense of teaching, mentorship, and research. Pensive’s AI-assisted grading tool is designed to eliminate that bottleneck. Institutions that adopted the platform during beta reported meaningful shifts in how that reclaimed time was spent. At UC Berkeley, a 1,000-student Data Science course used the time saved to launch human-led group tutoring sessions for the first time. At Columbia University, a math course deployed a course-aligned AI tutor that handled tens of thousands of student questions while maintaining academic rigor.

Pensive says the new capital will be used to expand features that support deep learning and critical thinking, and to strengthen the connection between instructors and students. Grading, the company says, is just the beginning — its longer-term vision is a platform that gives every student access to the kind of thoughtful, personalized academic support that has historically been available only to a fortunate few.