YZi Labs has made its first move into AI software, leading an $11 million seed round in VideoTutor, an AI-based education platform founded by 20-year-old Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kai Zhao.
Key points to remember:
- YZi Labs led an $11 million funding round in VideoTutor, marking its first investment in AI software.
- VideoTutor, founded by 20-year-old Kai Zhao, turns any question into a personalized, animated lesson.
- The funding will drive R&D and global expansion, as VideoTutor evolves its AI-powered education engine.
The round included participation from JinQiu Fund (affiliated with ByteDance), Baidu Ventures, Amino Capital and BridgeOne Capital.
The investment marks YZi Labs’ first bet on AI since expanding its scope earlier this year, the company announced in a recent article on X.
AI Tutor VideoTutor turns questions into animated lessons and reaches 20,000 users in 10 days
VideoTutor positions itself as an “AI educational agent” that converts any question into a personalized, animated, voice-guided lesson.
The platform combines a large language model (LLM) with a Manim-based rendering pipeline, enabling accurate visualization of complex topics such as equations, diagrams, and scientific concepts.
Within 10 days of its launch in May 2025, the platform reached over 20,000 users and generated over 20,000 videos, while receiving 1,000 API integration requests from schools and learning platforms.
Dr Jing Xiong, director of AI investments at YZi Labs and former Google Gemini engineer, said VideoTutor’s hybrid AI model outperforms broadcast-based video tools by ensuring “semantic accuracy and visual clarity” at a lower cost.
The company’s proprietary layout manager and fault-tolerant LLM loop enable faster and more accurate video generation than competitors.
VideoTutor aims to make high-quality tutoring accessible to everyone, taking into account that more than 85% of American students cannot afford traditional tutoring, which costs on average between $60 and $90 per hour.
Its reach currently spans K-12, SAT/ACT prep, STEM, and language learners.
The seed funding will fuel R&D and global expansion, with plans to improve its AI animation engine, scale its infrastructure, and establish partnerships with educational institutions in North America and Europe.
“We received more than ten term sheets for this round, but chose YZi Labs as the lead investor because we share the same belief: education should be personalized, affordable and accessible to everyone,” Zhao said.
YZi Labs leads $50 million bet on better payment network
YZi Labs, the venture capital arm formerly known as Binance Labs, has led a $50 million funding round for Better Payment Network (BPN), a startup building stablecoin-based payment rails to streamline global settlements.
The funding, one of the largest initial payment rounds this year, comes amid YZi Labs’ growing focus on CeDeFi infrastructure for emerging markets.
BPN’s system, built on BNB Chain, merges DeFi automation with traditional compliance to enable real-time minting and settlement of fiat-backed stablecoins.
The platform aims to reduce cross-border transfer times from days to hours while reducing transaction costs by 2% to 0.3%. Its model removes the need for pre-funded liquidity, thereby freeing trapped capital and improving market efficiency.
The startup already supports transfers between regions like Brazil, Nigeria, Mexico, and the Eurozone, and plans to launch a DeFi FX marketplace by the end of the year to support up to 20 regional stablecoins.
YZi Labs called BPN a “game changer” for payments, saying its on-chain liquidity network could outperform both traditional fintech and fragmented Web3 payment systems.
The article CZ’s YZi Labs Leads $11M Round in AI Education Video Tutor Startup in First AI Investment appeared first on Cryptonews.
